Miracles--Homegrown and Otherwise

“Now what are you up to, Marc,” said Lady, magically not appearing on this Wednesday morning, since last night was a double billing of signing her little plaster houses for the gringos at a resort in lands to the east, and the weekly poetry slam. So that made for a long night, which makes for a long morning, devoted to and attended by Morpheus, guarding Lady in her deep and much-merited slumber.

“Get back to bed,” I tell Lady. “You don’t always have to be here, since in fact you’re never not here. Anyway, the Patriarch of the Tribe of Amir is here, and does walk the café, rendering homage to guests and…”

“Enough—are you still cooking up that religion?”

“Just written the first parable,” I told her, “and let me tell you, the stuff just writes itself. If I’m going to be doing this for a year, I’m gonna be freakin’ bored, and so will everyone else. In fact, the parable was so boring that the woman at the next table was yawning!”

“Why a parable?”

Can’t she see? If this is going to be any religion at all, it’s gotta have the stuff that religions are made of. In fact, today’s task should be to make a miracle, which would be appropriate, since we are in the 16^th week after Trinity.

“I don’t know why I’m worried about it, because really, whoever wrote Luke—if it wasn’t Luke—didn’t go to any particular trouble about it. In fact, it’s as thin as a Wal-Mart sheet….”

“What is, Marc?”

“The miracle of the son of the widow of Nain.”

“Don’t know it.”

“Neither did I, but I had to look it up, since the cantata for the 16^th week after Trinity is supposed to be based on it. So here it is….”

11 Soon afterward Jesus went to a town named Nain, accompanied by His disciples and a large crowd. 12 And when He arrived at the gate of the town, a funeral procession was coming out. A young man had died, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. And a large crowd from the town was with her. 13 And when the Lord saw her, His heart was filled with pity for her, and He said to her, “Do not weep”. 14 Then He walked over and touched the coffin, while the pallbearers stood still. Jesus said to the dead man, “Young man, I say to thee, arise!” And he who was dead, sat up and began to talk, and Jesus gave him back to his mother.

16 Then they all were filled with awe and praised God. And they said, “A great prophet has risen among us”, and “God has visited His people”.

17 This news about Jesus went out through all the country and the surrounding territory.

“That’s it?” said Lady.

“That’s totally it. As an English teacher, I have to say that the story is completely lacking. Does the widow of Nain have a history, what they call the “back story” nowadays? Is she rich or poor, young or old? Why does she not have any dialogue? Did she recognize that Jesus was the savior? Did she entreat him to intercede? For that matter, why did Christ stick his nose in the whole business? Weren’t there funerals left and right at the time? Or was he getting a visit that day from the head honcho from Home Office, and feel the need to perform a little miracle?”

“Good questions…”

“Look, any five-year old child could cook up a better miracle than that. Anyway, isn’t raising the dead just a bit of a cliché, or was it new and brave at the time? Evidently not, since there is the Raising of the Son of the Widow of Zarephath—I’m not making this up—in Elijah.”

“You know, the more I look at it, the less convinced I am about this Jesus thing,” I told her. “Christ is supposed to be running around doing all this bat-shit stuff like raising the dead and throwing the money changers out of the temple and causing earthquakes and eclipses after his death. But nobody gets around to writing about it until well after his death, even though—in theory, and what do I know—the first century was well documented, for the time. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m going to all the trouble of inventing parables and miracles—of a substantially higher order than the Bible’s—when verily there did come to be in the Poet’s Passage an instrument sent via the angels who guided the hands of Omar, esteemed and revered acolyte of the Poet’s Passage.”

A piano had appeared yesterday in the Poet’s Passage. Those of a less mystic mindset reported that Omar had seen a pastor who was trying to get rid of four pianos.

“Do you suppose miracles will appear weekly in the Poet’s Passage, now that I’m busying myself inventing them?” I asked Lady. “Is this a sign? And if God is sending us pianos, how do we know that next week He won’t be peeved, and send us a plague of locusts? I worry a bit that I might be opening the door, as it were, to the other world, and who knows what might pop in?”

“Ridiculous, we’re not having locusts in the Passage,” said Lady. “Anyway, last week was all about poverty, and look how that worked out! A piano! So what’s this week—the 16^th after whatever—about?”

“Get ready,” I told her, “it’s all about death.”

“Well, well, from poverty to death—I can see that.”

“There is a certain connection,” I told her. “But it’s interesting that Bach is more into death than your average Goth. Oh, and the world stinks, according to him.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, take this…”

  Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben?

    Meine Zeit läuft immer hin,

    und des alten Adams Erben,

    unter denen ich auch bin,

     haben dies zum Vaterteil,

     daß sie eine kleine Weil

     arm und elend sein auf Erden

und denn selber Erde warden

“Marc, you know I don’t speak German…”

“Neither do I, so I cheat and use the Bach Cantatas website. Short version: When, Dear Lord, will I die? For we occupy this wretched earth but for a little time, until we then become earth itself.”

“Oh, very cheery,” said Lady. “Anyone would be jumping out of bed on a Sunday morning, ignoring the effects of Saturday night, just to hear that message!”

“Well, you have to admit, it’s a good strategy. And really, life was not so great in Bach’s time. They had just gotten done with the 30 years war, which had been one of the longest and bloodiest struggles in European History. The plague was still around, and had killed at least a third of the population earlier in the century. And did you know that in Bach’s time, there was a dance plague?”

“Say what?”

“Yup, people were spontaneously breaking into hysterical dancing, which sounds funny but wasn’t. They danced and danced to the point of exhaustion, and then fell dead of cardiac arrest. Nobody has ever been able to explain it.”

Lady considers this.

“Look,” she said, “however bad life was, dancing your way to death sounds pretty good to me.”

She may be right….

      

    

Parable of the Rich Woman

It was a tradition we had, and though my heart wasn’t in it, I felt I had to carry it on. A man can bear his burden of troubles alone, and should, but a boy? Who could deprive a now motherless child of a bedtime story? And so I entered the room, with the candlelight flickering its shadows on the beamed ceiling. The evening was warm, but even so, Carl Phillip huddled under a blanket. He needed either comfort or protection; it may be he needed both.

“Are you well, my son?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“And what troubles you?”

“Georg told me that we would have to move. He says that the house is too big, and there’s no one to take care of us, and that paying a woman to do the cooking and cleaning will be too expensive. So we’ll have to move away and live somewhere else, and I don’t want that. I want to stay in our house!”

Ahh—so that’s what had been troubling him. I assumed my father’s voice, and told him the story as my father had told me, and as his father had told him. Had his father told my grandfather the story? Very likely—who knew who first had concocted it? Indeed, perhaps no one had invented it: it may simply have been always part of us, as old as language itself. And so I began….

One day, in a town not far from here, there lived an old woman who was very rich. Each day, she counted her money, and each day—despite any amount she had spent—she became richer. At first, counting her money took only an hour or two in the morning, but gradually—and as she became richer—it took longer, so that she often spent all of her morning counting her money.

As she grew richer, she became obsessed with accuracy, and thus she began to recount the money, and then recount again, until she was satisfied that every last pfennig was accounted for. Then she went out to do her shopping, but the prices! They seemed to be higher and higher ever day, and so she began to make sacrifices. She no longer ate meat, but instead had a bit of cheese. Grapes were an impossible luxury—apples would have to do. At last, even though her fortune was growing rapidly, she no longer bought anything at all, but instead began lurking at the back of the stores. At the fishmonger, she retrieved skeletons with which to make stock; at the greengrocer, she ate the fruit that had begun to rot.

Still her fortune was growing mightily. She had never had friends in the neighborhood, but now the thought began to obsess her: what if something should happen to her money? Worse, what if someone tried to steal her money? She lived in terror of poverty, and resolved to trust no one.

In the house next to hers lived a young woman with her husband and six children. Each day, she noticed the old lady, and each day she saw that she was thinner. The old lady’s dress grew shabby—there was no money to buy a new one, and even if they were, the price of fabric! So the young lady began to cook a bit extra every day, and she would send one of the children over to leave the food on the old lady’s threshold. She sewed a new dress for the lady as well, and when the weather turned cold, made her a thick warm coat as well.

The townspeople saw all of this, and knew that the old lady could easily afford the finest meats, the choicest wines, and ermine coats. They knew as well that the younger woman often went unfed, since she had her six children and her husband to feed. And as the winter snows began to fall, they saw that the young woman had only her threadbare slippers to go to the shops in.

Still the money grew and grew, still the old lady refused to spend a nickel. She ate only the food given her by her poor neighbor, and she talked to no one. Completely alone, she began talking to herself, muttering to herself; a rumor started that she was a witch, and spread like fire through the village.

The money was now flooding in—daily, it took three or four men hours to bring in the cases of bullion that she was reaping. The safe was full, soon the rooms were full, at last there was no room without boxes on boxes of money—so much money that she could not count it all. The old lady grew suspicious—what if some of the boxes had no money, but instead rocks from the river? She demanded that every box be opened, and each pfennig counted and recounted. At last, there was room for only one more box, which she had put high on a stack of other boxes on a table in the center of the room. She stood before it, thinking how little money she had, really, and how easily she might lose the pittance she had.

Just then the table began to wobble (there had never been enough money to repair its legs) and then suddenly, the table collapsed, and the old lady—so rich and so poor—was crushed and died instantly, under her enormous pile of money.

The villagers heard the crash, and rushed to the house of the old lady. They stood amazed at the huge amount of money lying everywhere, and instantly the fights burst out. Each person had a claim to the money—each person had befriended the old lady, each person had been told by the old lady that the money would be theirs, each person had a sick child or a leaky roof or a baby on the way, and how would she feed it? And so they argued bitterly, though really there was enough money for everyone. Only the young neighbor, who had fed and clothed the elderly lady for years, was silent. Indeed, she was in the corner of the room, crying softly.

As the fights grew ever more fierce, an elegant coach drawn by eight jet-black stallions drew up to the house. A handsome man of fifty years alighted, and went to the house of the young neighbor, knocking on her door for entry. The young woman went out to greet him at her house. They entered the house only to come out of it again in five minutes. She appeared grave and worried; he strode across the lawn, marched into the house, and called for order. The battles for the money had grown ferocious.

“Stop,” he cried, “there is but one person who has claim to the money, for it was I who sent it to her, as I can prove, from these bank rolls here.” He showed them the rolls, and then pointed to the young woman, whose face was graver than ever. 

Ever afterward, the town debated the circumstances surrounding the event. Had the man sent the money to the wrong house, as some believed? Had he known that the young woman’s sole interest was the older woman’s welfare, and not her money? Some even believed that he had sent the money to the older woman as a kind of test; if so, had she passed?

What is known?

The stranger departed. The townspeople returned to their homes. The younger woman summoned her children, who gathered up the lifeless body of the older woman they had never known, and took her to their house, to await her burial. The younger woman was alone in the house, with all the gold she now possessed. She stayed for a moment, and then left the house, never to return, and left the front door…

…completely open.    

Trauermusik

He was a sensitive child, more than most; I would come across him gazing into space; when I scolded him for wasting the time God had given him, he would burst into tears.

Was it my fault? Even now, these centuries later and well into my afterlife, I feel that pain, and the shame I felt at the time.

Make no mistake, I know very well who I am, or at least who I was. False modesty? You won’t find it here, nor did you find it when I lived. I had been given a great gift, yes, but equally I had toiled, and struggled to develop it. Never a day went by when I wasn’t composing, and more—recomposing. However much Lady might wish to believe that some of my music arrived on the wings of angels, I can assure you that it did not. And truly, if it had, it wouldn’t have been very good.

I was and am and will be the greatest composer of all time. I know that now, and I knew that then, and yet did anyone around me know? Most musicians thought of me as a great organist, not as a great composer, but was even that appreciated?  How many times was I scolded by some cleric with less Latin and Greek than I—scolded  for adding a bit of improvisation between verses of the Sunday hymns? The improvisations confused the congregation, I was told. The plodding oaf who had preceded me had never done such a thing!

It was a battle, then, but a battle I did not hesitate to fight. Always, always I struggled with the buffoons who thought they could play or tweet or sing—never was I given the musicians I deserved! A handful came up to some minimal level of not-too-shudderingly-bad, but even they were too often drowned by the idiot next to them, for I tell you, the worse a musician is, the louder he plays or sings.

How often I had to protest! Never did I have an employer who understood, who knew the quality of the music I composed! You know the Goldberg Variations, of course, but does anyone know of Johann Gottlieb Goldberg? No, his only claim to any shred of musical history is that he played my variations for the Count Keyserlink, who—according to one preposterous story—actually paid me a goblet fulled with 100 louis-d’or.  

They said I had a temper; they said I was difficult. Wrong! I knew perfectly well that if I didn’t stand up for myself, no one else would, and was it right that I, the greatest composer of the time, be treated as a lackey, a servant? I had seen what had happened to several of my relatives—all fine musicians—who had struggled into and out of poverty for years. And if I was fortunate enough to do just a bit better, it wasn’t due to luck, nor entirely to my ability. It was because I demanded the high respect and treatment that I deserved.

Experience has taught me; sometimes the worst employers are the ones you like the most. Certainly that was true of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. What musician could not have been charmed by the man, a talented man who could play the violin and viola da gamba, and often did so with his court band? Yes, he knew perfectly well what he had in me, and he paid me well. But such was his love of music that it was necessary—according to him—to take his musicians along with him on his travels.

How often are the whims of the rich paid for with the tears of the poor! Search, writer, for the reason that we had to be dragged off that summer of 1720, since something was important for the Prince, and so we all went off with him. Ah, you do not know, but I can tell you: the prince was taking the waters at Carlsbad.

What do I remember of the day my life was wrenched from its orbit? The looks of the villagers, my neighbors, as I finally returned to my home, as I walked though the streets. Or rather, the interrupted looks, since everyone glanced at me, greeted me, and just as quickly looked away and hurried off. They knew: I did not.

And what of the silence that greeted me—shouldn’t that have told me that something was wrong? For the house was never noisy, but neither was it dead silent, either—what house with small children ever is? But in fact the children were with the neighbor, so that the pastor could tell me that my wife María Barbara had died.

Death, that great bastard death! I met it first when I was six; it visited and vanquished my cousin. When I was ten it took first my mother, and then, nine months later, my father. I buried nine of my children, but this death was the worst.

Yes, we had been playing soothing music for the prince and as the warm waters had lapped gently on the prince’s sensitive skin, my María Barbara had felt first the flush, then the raging fever, then the nausea. She was, they told me, dead within twenty-four hours.

Everything was upside down. Before, I had had things to do, now there was nothing to be done. The body was buried, the funeral had been held. Her clothes had been taken away, though some of her things that might have some meaning or utility had been left. The house was both empty and filled with her absence, but could I sit and weep? No, because there were the children to think of, and however much I wanted to see them, I dreaded seeing them as well. How could a crushed man be any comfort to his grieving children?

But saw them I did, and we embraced, and we went on, as before.

Well, not as before. Because the second child, Carl Phillip Emanuel, had changed. The abstractions, the looking into the distance, the unnatural quietness of the child became more pronounced. My heart was torn; gazing on my son, my heart broke. I buried my grief with work, but he? When there were lessons to be learned and music to be copied out and any number of tasks to be done—this six-year old boy was looking out the window, as if trying to see the place where his mother might be.

And so I spoke roughly, harshly to the child. Only so much time was given to us by the good Lord: hadn’t we had proof of that? It was a sin to waste it.

He returned to whatever it was he was supposed to be doing. And then it was I, looking out the window, trying to find that land I used to live in, that house.

God, merciful God, when will this pain end?  

 

Lady Wisdom

“It’s funny how listening to the piece over the week has changed my understanding of it,” said Lady, a most insightful and perceptive woman.

“First, I was just focused on the music—how beautiful it was. But now, and especially after hearing it with the text, I really get what Bach is doing. Consider the long, melancholy opening—perfect for an extended musing on poverty.”

“Well, there’s no instrument more melancholic than an oboe, and especially these baroque oboes, which are a little deeper in timbre. And notice the accompaniment in the strings—that de DEE dum. All meant to suggest sighs….”

“The thing is, all of the singers don’t get it, for most of the piece. They’re going on and on about how poor they are, how all the animals and the birds have their foods provided for them, but they no. And then the chorus breaks in with this absolutely heavenly music, all about how the Father will care for his child, and then they go right on. Bach doesn’t even given them a rest—it’s like the choir had never sung anything at all. You know, that’s poverty—being so focused on your misery that you can’t see anything else, especially the things that might enrich you. Have you ever been poor, Marc?”

I stop to think.

“It depends on what you mean,” I said. “I’ve never been hungry. But I remember a time when I only had twenty bucks or so in the bank, and no property or assets beyond some books, a couple of cellos, and the clothes I wore. I was working, but only making a couple hundred dollars a week—and that doesn’t go far in Puerto Rico. I’d wake up at night and wonder: what would happen if Raf found somebody else and we broke up? How would I survive? Would I have to go back to Wisconsin, my tail between my legs, and live with my parents? Go back to nursing, which at that point I hated, just to get by? It was scary, but then, what isn’t at two in the morning?”

“Doesn’t count,” said Lady. “If there’s a plan B—however bad it might be—then you’re not really poor. Poor is when your back is against the wall and there’s no real option and you’ve been kicked so long and so hard that you’ve stopped remembering a time when you weren’t getting kicked. Oh, and you’ve almost stopped feeling the blows, though you do, of course.”

“OK—so what about you?”

“I got closer,” she said. “In high school, it was a pretty bad time for my family. We had had ups and downs, and this was one of the downs. I remember having only 25 cents in my pocket, and wondering whether I was going to go home—‘cause my mother was having a lot of problems at the time, and it wasn’t always good, being there at home. Or maybe I’d go to my aunt, which would be OK, but what about my mother? So there wasn’t much stability, and definitely not much money.”

“But…”

“Of course, I had dreams. I always knew there would be a Poet’s Passage, and I knew that we’d make it.”

“Then maybe I came closer than you, after all,” I said. “Because if there’s anything that depression is, it’s ‘poverty of spirit.’ And there were years there when I had given up hope. Hard to explain, because on the face of it, everything was OK. Even when I was at last making money, saving money, able to take real vacations—well, it doesn’t mean much if you’re having crying jags in the men’s room at work, and you can concentrate because the thought, ‘I want to die,’ keeps intruding itself in your head….”

“That’s poverty,” said Lady, who has managed to live just on the shoreline of wealth. So the money washes in, refreshing her, and then washes away, but that’s no problem because the sun is bracing and besides, the next wave will be along in a few seconds, so why worry? True, just at the moment she’s broke, but not really, since the cause of the break was a kitten who smelled a saint / sucker and followed her home, purring and wrapping itself around her legs. So now Lady has no money, but she does have a cat, though not really, since in fact she has two cats at home, both of which would eat the kitten as a snack before breakfast. Or maybe like a canapé with cocktails.

“The kitten’s name is Eugenia,” I tell Lady, as I hold the kitten and scratch its ears. “Look, I’ll show you….”

“Eugenia,” I whispered to the kitten. Her head jerked up.

“See?” I told Lady.

“No fair,” cried Lady, “you’ve got your thumb under Kitty-X’s head. No, it’s Kitty-X—that’s the name!”

Well, we’re not going to agree, so we go back to the Bach.

“As a cellist, I would kill to play that cello part,” I told Lady, in reference to the bass aria, Auf Gott steht meine zubersicht.  All of the doubt has fallen away, and the bass is singing his praises to God, who has sent the check in the mail. “You know, only God could have trumped Bach for contrapuntal music….”

Right, I keep forgetting.

“It’s music in which each instrument—or group of instruments—is given a complete distinct, though very much related, line. I mean, the aria starts out with the violins presenting the theme, and the rest of the orchestra going plunk / plunk / plunk as an accompaniment. But then all of a sudden the celli are doing the theme, and the violins are going plunk / plunk /plunk. Then Bach starts ripping the heme apart, and then all of the voices are speaking, but instead of being at a maddening musical cocktail party, it all makes glorious sense. No one line dominates, and the sum is always bigger than the whole. And that’s why you can listen to this music forever. There’s always something new that you’ve never heard before, and then you’re smacking you forehead and wondering why you’d never happened on it….”

“There’s something so joyful about that aria, though maybe joyful isn’t the word.”

“It’s a quality only Bach has, I think,” I told her. “It’s a kind of jubilation based on very great faith and very great understanding. And it’s very difficult to name it. ‘Jubilation’ implies a sense of victory, but that would imply that something or someone has been defeated, and there’s no gloating. The same holds true for the word ‘exultation.’ There’s the sense that a long, confused struggle has finally been won, and joy and awe have prevailed, but with deep humility, and deeper understanding. Does that make any sense?”

“The word is rapturous, I think,” said Lady, “from the Latin raptus, whence the term for the birds of prey, the raptors. Because I can only think that Bach, in those moments has been seized by the Holy Spirit. I imagine him there in his church, struggling and toiling, the wheels and gears of his mind spinning until he reaches the pinnacle of distraction and abstraction, and then--so high has he reached--he stumbles and falls into the abyss. There he is falling, falling, and the the celestial eagle of the Holy Spirit swoops and seizes him. Whoosh! In a second he is soaring over the verdant, soft hills of Thuringia; he is seeing the world as only the angels can see it. For a brief moment, he occupies the moment we all aspire to: He soars between the world and the heavens, and can see both. But at last, he is returned, and finds himself again in his church. He rubs his eyes, and wonders: was it real? Had he been dreaming? And then, his eyes fall on the music, and he knows. It was real.”

Damn! Why, if I am writing this, does Lady get all the best lines?