I Am a Strange Loop (71 page)

In my parents’ record collection, there was also a recording of several Bach organ works as performed by Albert Schweitzer, but it took me a long time to come around to giving it a try, because I feared it would be too “heavy”. But when I finally did, what I heard was incredibly moving and I became as addicted to it as I had ever been to
The Well-Tempered Clavier.
I then naturally expanded my search in record stores to include Bach organ works, but I soon discovered something that troubled me, which was that many performers took them very swiftly and jauntily, as if they were merely virtuoso exercises as opposed to profound statements about the human condition. Schweitzer’s playing was humble and simple, and it charmed me that he made mistakes now and then but simply went on unperturbedly (in no other recordings would one hear even a
single
mistake anywhere, which struck me as unnatural and even bizarre). It also happened, although I didn’t know it then, that these performances had all been recorded on a simple organ in the very church in the Alsatian village of Günsbach whose bells had pealed one bright spring morning, saving the lives of a bird or two, and transforming young Albert’s life, and therewith, the lives of thousands of people.

Dig that Profundity!

Over the years, Bach as played by Schweitzer became a deep part of me. I obtained several more recordings by him, all belonging to the same series, each one revealing new depths of a cosmic wisdom (perhaps that sounds grandiose, but to me it is exactly on the mark) that emanated from both composer and performer.

I was naturally filled with gratification when the popularity of my book
Gödel, Escher, Bach
linked my name in some fashion in the musical community with that of Bach (this was a true honor), and in Bach’s 300th birthyear, 1985, I had the pleasure of participating in several tricentennial celebrations, including a tiny one on his exact birthday that I organized in Ann Arbor for the members of a class I was teaching, plus a few friends, the highlight of which was the small firestorm unleashed when we lit all 300 candles on the giant birthday cake I had ordered.

Fifteen years later, I was surprised to be invited to participate in a commemoration in Rovereto, Italy, of the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death (which had taken place in July of 1750), but since I was going to be in northern Italy at that time in any case, I gladly accepted. Several memorable talks were delivered in the afternoon, and after a banquet there was to be a treat — a performance of a number of Bach pieces (transcribed for small chorus) by a well-known singing troupe. I remembered their skill and was looking forward to a rewarding evening of moving music.

What I heard, however, was something quite different, although I should perhaps have anticipated it: a nonstop display of unrestrained vocal virtuosity, and nothing but that. It was terribly impressive, but to my mind it was also terribly vapid. The lowlight of the entire performance for me was when the singers came to one of the most profound of all the Bach organ fugues — the G minor fugue often called simply “The Great” (BWV 542), a work that I loved as played by Albert Schweitzer in all his modesty, but with unrivaled depth of feeling. Regrettably, I will never forget how they tackled this meditative fugue at roughly twice the speed it should be taken at, lighting into it as if they were sprinting to catch a train, and struttin’ their stuff like nobody’s business. They bounced on their toes, as if to try to get the audience to swing along with their snappy rhythm, and they even snapped their fingers to the beat (even the word “beat” sounds ridiculous in this hallowed context). Several of the singers periodically flashed bright grins at the audience, as if to say, “Aren’t we fabulous? Ever heard anyone sing so many notes per second in your life? How about those trills! Isn’t this music sexy? Hope you’re all diggin’ it! And don’t forget, we have lots of CD’s you can buy after the show!”

All of this threw me for a real loop. Of course there is room in this world for many ways to perform any work of music, and of course there was something
interesting
about these singers’ speed and slickness, and the way that they executed ultrarapid trills flawlessly — it was impressive in much the same way as the engineering details of a beautiful sports car are impressive — but for me it had nothing to do with the
meaning
of the music. That meaning was contemplative and cosmic, not frilly and show-offy. I am tolerant of many diverse ways of playing pieces of music, but I also have my limits and this went considerably beyond them. It made me long to hear the slightly flawed, very mortal, and reflective profundity of Albert Schweitzer at his little village organ in Günsbach, but that was not in the cards that evening. It was a classic case of sacred versus profane, and it remains vivid in my memory.

Only in preparing this chapter did I come across some writings by Schweitzer himself that strangely echo (if echoes can precede their causes!) my great troubledness that evening in Rovereto. Here is what he wrote, almost one hundred years earlier, about performances of Bach in that era:

Many performers have been performing Bach for years without experiencing for themselves the deepening that Bach is capable of bringing out in any true artist. Most of our singers are far too caught up in technique to sing Bach correctly. Only a very small number of them can reproduce the spirit of his music; the rest of them are incapable of penetrating into the Master’s spiritual world. They do not feel what Bach is trying to say, and therefore cannot transmit it to anyone else. Worst of all, they consider themselves to be outstanding Bach interpreters, and have no awareness of what it is that they lack. Sometimes one has to wonder how listeners who attend such superficial performances are able to detect even the slightest sign of the depth of Bach’s music.

Those who understand the situation today will not consider these comments to be exaggeratedly pessimistic. Our enchantment with Bach is undergoing a crisis. The danger is that our love for Bach’s music will become superficial and that too much vanity and smugness will be mixed in with it. Our era’s lamentable trend towards imitation comes out also in the way that we take Bach over, which is all too visible these days. We act as if we wanted to praise Bach, but in truth we only praise ourselves. We act as if we had rediscovered him, understood him, and performed him as no one has ever done before. A bit less noise, a bit less “Bach dogmatism”, a bit more ability, a bit more humility, a bit more tranquility, a bit more devotion… Only thus will Bach be more honored in spirit and in truth than he has been before.

There is little I can add to this trenchant criticism of superficiality taking itself for depth; I will simply say that running across it comforted me, even though I did so several years after the Rovereto event, as it made me know that I am not alone in my lamentation. Schweitzer was the most humble and self-effacing of people, and so his remarks have to be taken as nothing other than an honest reaction to a deplorable trend that was already clear a century ago and that seems only to be increasing today.

Alle Grashüpfer Müssen Sterben

What, some readers may be asking themselves, does any of this have to do with “I” or consciousness or souls? My response would be, “What could have
more
to do with consciousness or souls than merging oneself with the combined spirituality of Albert Schweitzer and J. S. Bach?”

The other night, in order to refresh my musty memories of Schweitzer playing Bach organ music (which I listened to hundreds of times in my teen-age years and my twenties), I pulled all four of the old vinyl records off my shelf and put them on in succession. I began with the prelude and fugue in A major (BWV 536, nicknamed by Schweitzer the “walking fugue”) and went through many others, winding up with my very favorite, the beatific prelude and fugue in G major (BWV 541), and then as a final touch, I listened to the achingly sweet–sad chorale-prelude “Alle Menschen Müssen Sterben” (“We All Must Die” — or perhaps, in order to echo the trochaic meter of the German, “Human Beings All Are Mortal”).

While I was sitting silently in my living room, listening intently to the soft notes of these fathomless meditations, I noticed a lone grasshopper sitting on the rug. At first I thought it was dead (after all, all grasshoppers must die, too), but when I approached, it took a big hop, so I quickly grabbed a glass bowl from a nearby table, flipped it over to trap the little jumper, then carefully slid a record cover underneath, so as to form a floor for this glassy room. Then I carried the improvised craft and its diminutive passenger to my front door, opened it, and let the grasshopper leap down onto a bush in the dark night. Only while I was in the middle of this minisamaritan act did the resonance with Schweitzer’s spirit cross my mind — in fact, it happened just as I slid the record cover, which has a drawing by Ben Shahn of Schweitzer at the organ, underneath the glass bowl, so that the grasshopper was sitting on Schweitzer’s hand. Something felt just right about this fortuitous conjunction.

An hour or so later, as I got up to stretch, I chanced to notice a carpenter ant crawling under a table, and so once again I made a little transport vehicle for it and escorted my six-legged friend outside. It started to seem rather curious to me that all this mini-samaritanism was happening while I was so immersed in Bach’s profound spirituality and Schweitzer’s pacifistic mentality of “reverence for life”.

Perhaps to break this spell, or perhaps to underline my own personal dividing line, I then saw another little black dot moving in a certain familiar zigzaggy fashion in the air near a lamp, and I went to investigate. The small black dot landed on the table below the lamp, and there was no question what it was: a mosquito,
un moustique, una zanzara, eine Mücke.
One moment later, that
Mücke
was history (I’ll spare you the details). By this point, I suspect, my views on the expendability of mosquitoes have probably become an annoyingly familiar refrain to readers of this book, but I have to say that I felt not the tiniest twinge of regret at the late bloodseeking missile’s demise.

A little before midnight, I interrupted my music-listening session to call my aging and ailing mother out in California, since I have a routine of phoning her every evening to give her a bit of family news and a bit of cheer. After our brief chat, I returned to my music, and when the Dorian toccata and fugue came on, I found my thoughts turning to a close friend who deeply loves that piece, and to his son, who had just been diagnosed with a worrisome illness. The music went on, and all these thoughts about beloved people and the precious, frightening fragility of human life somehow blended naturally with it.

To cap it all off, at some point after midnight, I heard a knock at the back door (not a standard event at our house, I assure you!), and I went to see who it was. It turned out to be a teen-ager whom I had met once or twice, who had been kicked out of his home a month earlier by his parents and who was sleeping in parks. He said it was a bit nippy that night and asked me if he could sleep in our playroom. I thought about it for a moment and since I knew my daughter trusted him, I said yes.

All at once it seemed an extremely strange coincidence that all of these intensely human things, these events dependent on my mirroring of other beings’ interiorities, were taking place right while I was so focused on the concepts of compassion and magnanimity.

Friends

Compassion, magnanimity, reverence for life — all these are qualities epitomized by Albert Schweitzer, who in addition had the remarkable quality of being a reverential Bach organist — but to my mind, this is no accident. Some might say that Schweitzer and people of his rare caliber are
selfless.
I understand this idea and I think there’s some truth to it, but on the other hand, oddly enough, I have been arguing, as does etymology, that the more magnanimous one is, the
greater
one’s self or soul is, not the smaller! So I would say that those who strike us as self-less are in fact very soul-full — that is, they house many other souls inside their own skulls/brains/minds/souls — and I don’t think this sharing of mind-space diminishes their central core but enlarges and enriches it. As Walt Whitman put it in his poem “Song of Myself ”, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” All this richness is a consequence of the fact that at some point in the dim past, the generic human brain surpassed a critical threshold of flexibility and became quasi-universal, able to internalize the abstract essences of other human brains. It is something to marvel at.

One day, as I was trying to figure out where I personally draw the line for applying the word “conscious” (even though of course there’s no sharp cutoff), it occurred to me that the most crucial factor was whether or not the entity in question could be said to have some notion, perhaps only very primitive, of “friend”, a friend being someone you care about and who cares about you. It seems clear that human babies acquire the rudiments of this notion pretty early on, and it also seems clear that some kinds of animals — mostly but not only mammals — have a pretty well-developed sense of the “friend” concept.

It’s clear that dogs feel that certain humans and dogs are their friends, and possibly also a few other animals. I won’t try to enumerate which types of animals seem capable of acquiring the “friend” notion because it’s blurry and because you can run down a mental list just as easily I can. But the more I think about this, the righter it feels to me. And so I find myself led to the unexpected conclusion that what seems to be the epitome of selfhood — a sense of “I” — is in reality brought into being if and only if along with that self there is a sense of
other
selves with whom one has bonds of affection. In short, only when generosity is born is an ego born.

How different this is from the view held by the majorityof philosophers of mind about the nature of consciousness! That view is that consciousness is the consequence of having so-called
qualia,
the supposedly primordial experiences (such as the retinal buzz made by the color purple, the sound of middle C, or the taste of Cabernet Sauvignon) out of which all “higher” experiences are built in bottom-up fashion. My view, in contrast, posits a high abstraction as the threshold at which consciousness starts to emerge from the gloom. Mosquitoes may “experience” the quale of the taste of blood, but they are unconscious of that quale, in just the way that toilets respond to but are totally unconscious of the various qualia of different water levels. Now if mosquitoes only had big enough brains to allow them to have
friends,
then they could be
conscious
of that great taste! Alas, the poor small-brained mosquitoes are constitutionally deprived of that chance.