"He should be called sea, not Bach (brook in German), because of the never-ending richness of his harmonies."
—Ludwig van Beethoven, on Johann Sebastian Bach
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“The point is this. The arts are not the pretty but irrelevant bits around the border of reality. They are the highways into the center of a reality which cannot be glimpsed, let alone grasped, any other way. The present world is good, but broken and in any case incomplete; art of all kinds enables us to understand that paradox in its many dimensions. But the present world is also designed for something which has not yet happened. It is like a violin waiting to be played: beautiful to look at, graceful to hold-and yet if you'd never heard one in the hands of a musician, you wouldn't believe the new dimensions of beauty yet to be revealed. Perhaps art can show something of that, can glimpse the future possibilities pregnant within the present time.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense
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Dear Kate,
When for the second time in as many weeks a man told me he would like to have his violin strings replaced I knew the thin space between heaven and earth has grown that much thinner for him.
He is an old friend, relationally to me and temporally in and of himself. But he is about to change the second.
Sad to say but I don't play any instrument. Nothing well. Nothing to play in my basement without police showing up.
The band is playing Auld Lang Syne
Still I played, with my crooked finger (crooker the deeper my gaze seizing it), chapped lips kissing chrome (French), wandering back to a childhood I never had.
It isn't really his violin.
He got it from a garage sale, $25 he said, thrice lucidly articulated in two weeks, the kind of numeric detail he tends to remember, not a big investment to begin with, even less return to expect from it, disappointment to bear.
He was asking from me not much either: one string. Everything else is good to go, he claimed, but this one string, broken. If only, then everything else will fall back to its right place.
I know nothing about violin, but without smelling it I can tell his good find is not new. The garage where it once was is probably a laneway house now, making good progress in this ever-progressing world. Let's replace the whole set, all the strings, I proposed, based on what I knew about guitars.
Still I worried. If the violin is going to hold its tune. What other make-overs it will need me to give it to become playable again. Most of all, if my friend is going to derive any joy, open up to the space thinning, not be defeated, denied yet again. The neck, the jaw, the fingers, his, old, disease-stricken, and even if young and fresh, it's a violin after all, which, I heard, does violence to a body. The good kind that breaks you apart to make you whole.
Only that he couldn't afford to be broken any further apart.
Why not erhu? I asked him as I was asking myself. He sang, from time to time I heard, mostly Chinese tunes of old. Violin he once played, way back when only himself could recollect, not even his wife; his singing the part of his story that lingered on to meld into hers and then mine.
I pulled out my phone and started researching, and he took it from my hands, swiped it like he was peeling potatoes and triggered some menu I haven't seen before, hidden possibilities. The smartphone is one of the greatest inventions, I must say, to those who have greatness in mind.
I wasn't satisfied with anything I saw online. I don't know anything about erhu, what is good enough, better, great. Then I thought about friends and families who might know more, be the sea to my brook, be the guide to this man like
Beatrice to Dante through heaven.
It's a trite caricature to see heaven as a place where we play harps endlessly upon the clouds. How our most childish thoughts, clumsy pencilwork in our little picture books, often speak the first and final truths.
Yours, Alex
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