In a good marriage, it is impossible to separate sex from conversation. Dicacity, as much as venery, marks our evenings. No topic for us is interdicted, though neither tells the other all we know. We share a healthy respect for the dangers of depletion and the potential vacuity of the future.
Nothing must diminish the ardor with which we live with one another. Familiarity must breed not some great contempt but, however paradoxically, renewal. I do not want Emerson's complacent “friendship in possession.” I want the passion of pursuit; which is not, I trust, too much to ask when the woman I love seems forever beyond my grasp. Nothing must silence the song that is our marriage.
Another apt metaphor, that, since music has become, apart from Clara and after the betrayal of language, my life. I have found that sex and music are the only surviving divertissements into which I can dive through the crust of self, in which I can drown, and from which I can emerge inviolate.
I have even, this past day, and to replace the conversation I would otherwise have had with Clara, planned the music that will carry me through this evening until her return. And I have programmed it within the ten-disc magazine of my compact-disc player to bring me to that very “edge of desperation” in the realm of sound that my hunger will bring me in the realm of food and the absence of my wife in the realm of desire. And just as the arrival of the Chinese delivery boy will rescue me from my first-world version of starvation, so will the arrival home of Clara rescue me from the disemboguement of mind that such music might bring and from the longing in my body that her absence will inspire.
Of course, technology being what it is in this benevolently convenient age of ours, I have at hand two devices that will protect me from going over the edge should I begin to lose control: a telephone to summon my food and a remote-control instrument to reprogram or stop my music. But there is nothing here with which I might touch my wife tonight. She is beyond my reach. In matters of
love, we remain as primitive as the first human beings, whose primogenial words, according to Otto Jespersen, were sounds of courtship, “something between the nightly love-lyrics of puss upon the tiles and the melodious love-songs of the nightingale.” So was language born. Is it any wonder we cry out in the darkness?
Just before Clara left this evening, I played Celtic guitar music. And when she was gone, I did something I had never done before: I danced with only the feel of her in my arms. Then I lay down here and used the remote to change the music. I have never been able to listen to it without her.
So now, alone, I am listening to Bach's
Inventions
. All the evening's early discs are for solo instruments, to reflect my solitude. I have chosen the recording on the clavichord, as distinguished from the harpsichord or piano, because it is the “smallest” of the instruments, the least intrusive, the most homey. It was the domestic keyboard of choice, and the most practical, at the time. I thought it fitting to lead off my music tonight because I am planning to have so domestic an evening for myself, so comfortable and cozy, and the kind of journey of self-discovery that only solitude and darkness and the absence of one's beloved can provide.
I believe in these contrasts. There is no desire without deprivation. There is no hunger without depletion. It is not simply a matter of the tempo of life, as it was in the high Renaissance, when a slow dance would be followed by a fast. It is as much a matter of texture, as it became in the Baroque. Musically, I see it as the difference between the
stylus phantasticus
and the
stylus canonicus
. Philosophically,
it is the dreaminess of Apollo awakening into the rapture of Dionysius.
And I love the name
Inventions
. It suggests a certain improvisation, even chicanery, though Bach seems to have used it to mean something as simple as motif. He stole the name from some teaching pieces by the little-known Antonio Bonporti and wrote his own
Inventions
so his eldest and most beloved son, Wilhelm Friedemann, who was ten years old at the time, might have something interesting and instructive to play while learning the clavichord.
It is as if your father, to teach you to dance, provides you with instructions on how to leap from the floor and not come down until you so desire.
When I have thought of having a child, I have been either inspired or intimidated by the example of such magnificent didacticism. I have wondered what I would hope to pass on to him: my philomathic passions; my ability to be both of the world but not in it and in the world but not of it; my fidelity to ideas and to the flesh of one woman; my control over the chaos of life that might, by a stretch, be equated with the taming of chaos that Bach attained in his music, that transport “from the world of unrest to a world of peace,” as Albert Schweitzer put it in writing about
The Well-Tempered Clavier
, that other, more taxing collection of teaching pieces that Bach himself described as being “for the use and practice of young musicians who want to learn and for the amusement of those who already know this study.”
Amusement! His unaccustomed modesty is a weapon, and so can his music be unless you learn not to compete with its transcendence. If you listen to such music and say, “Why can't I do that?” you will hate yourself to the end of your days. It is not art but the failure to achieve it that
drives one mad.
Know your limits. Will I have the courage to pass that on? It is surely the hardest of life's lessons.
Love your mother.
Love her not the way I do, for I am her husband, but love her just as well.
Love your father too and in so doing redeem all that is past.
But what good are rubrics? Wilhelm Friedemann, on whom Bach bestowed the purest of his paternal love and the most patient and gentle of his contrapuntal initiations, ended up a drunk and, worse, stopped believing in his gift.
Even Bach could not provide ease in the world for his child. Not for any of them. And he had twenty.
I have spent much time pondering what evidence there is of his prodigious sexual life. All those children aside, there is the serious trouble he got himself into with the authorities at Arnstadt when, as they wrote it up, “he caused the strange maiden to be invited into the organ loft and let her make music there.”
I picture him, as I listen to his
Inventions
, passing from two-part to the increased difficulty of three, the Sinfonias, though never does he leap so far that he stops cradling the delicate sensibilities of his firstborn ⦠I picture him bending this strange maiden over the bench of his Gottfried Silbermann or Arp Schnitger and lifting her skirts with one hand while with the other he bangs out something he'd learned on his recent pilgrimage to Buxtehude in Lübeck.
*
The strange maiden herself releases him from his britches and says, “That's quite some organ,” and Bach responds, “Yes, it's a Silbermann,” or, “Yes, it's a Schnitger,” and they both enjoy the joke, and prolong it, as the strange maiden says, “Enter here, Silbermann,” or,
“You must have received a nasty blow, Schnitger, for you are all swollen,” and Bach responds to the strange maiden, “It is time for you to sing, with the accompaniment of my organ,” and as her fingers play along the length of him and grasp the thickness of him and finally force him headfirst through her silent, open lips, she begins to sing the only song that pullulating man never did set down.
Strange maiden. Since I first read of Bach's encounter with her in the organ loft in Arnstadt, I have become obsessed with her. She has become not simply whoever that adventuresome girl might have been back in 1706 and who is now dust's dust in some grave surely as unmarked as Bach's first, but every girl, any girl, who might lift her skirts and laugh and guide a strange lad into herself and then step off the page of history into oblivion.
It is marriage itself, and Clara as its embodiment, that has made a philogynist of me. When I walk with her in the streetâfor I am almost never out unless I'm out with herâI am assaulted by the beauty of the strange maidens I see at every turn. They seem etched into the very air even as they part it with the long blades of their legs. But then the air surrounds them, and they are gone, she is gone. Goodbye, I cry silently to her, goodbye into your life. She never hears me, and if she sees me, it is only inadvertently. I am part of the landscape of the city, another man in a tie bleak against the sky. I do reach for them, these women, but only with my eyes. It is not that they are necessarily unattainable, for who knows? Any one of them might yield, if spoken to, illaqueated in the lepid net of language. But then she would be a stranger no longer, and I would no longer long for her. A strange maiden's desirability resides precisely in her remaining indeterminate and unexplored.
A wife is as far from being a strange maiden as a
woman can be. A wife is known, from the permutable textures of her hair right down to the camber of her toes.
I am as rare in my mammalian monogamy as the klipspringer, the siamang, the reedbuck, and the incongruously named dik-dik. I want no other woman than my wife. The others, the strangers, who vanish like death, only break my heart. My wife holds it together.
Those who came after Bach and sought to sanctify him, as they believed he sanctified the evil in the world with his masses and motets, proclaimed that the strange maiden whom he lofted by the organ in Arnstadt was his cousin Maria Barbara, soon to be his wife.
They sought to excuse his sins by uxoriating them. How little they knew of marriage, which withers without the exaltation of sin.
Bach's wife died when he was away from Cöthen, where they lived while he accomplished such little things as the
Brandenburg Concertos
andâhow cruelly ironicâthe
Wedding Cantata
, in whose opening adagio the oboe impregnates the soprano.
When he arrived home from his travels, he was told that Maria Barbara had died and been buried.
No goodbyes. No final embrace. No vision to carry forever of his wife vulnerable and inviting on her back with her hands on her breasts and her legs demurely open beneath her shroud and within her closed eyes the knowledge of all the untold secrets of her life, never now to be whispered to him through those dry, dampened lips.
I think of Clara dying without my being there and without my even knowing. I never worry about this during the day, when we are separated, she running her shop, I right here where I always am. But sometimes, at night, when she is out, I feel like Pergolesi's Orfeo, afraid
of death only to the degree that I am separated from her. But we are almost always together at night. We love to sit and talk and drink our wine as this infinite room grows ever darker until finally we grow invisible to one another and our disembodied voices become entangled vapor trails in the illimitable sky. As long as we are talking, I know we are alive.
I get up from this bed and go to the north windows. The city spreads out before me the chaotic aftermath of a lavish dinner party, all tumbled glass and unfinished heaps of life. Where is Clara in all of this? Is she safe? Is she whole? Is she real? At least she had been wise enough not to carry her handbag in a city where you expect to see people wearing signs that say
NO ILLUSIONSâALREADY STOLEN
.
But what if she too were to die and be buried before I had knowledge of either? I would lie down upon her grave like Julia Duckworth upon her husband's and attempt to lift from it the veil of grass as I do the nightgown from her knees and thighs at night and claw my way through the dirt into the haven of her arms.
Unlike Bach, I would take no other wife for as long as Clara were to remain dead.
Bach lasted hardly a year before he relinquished a maiden's strangeness and married her.
She was twenty years old, and her name was Anna Magdalena. That is a wonderful name to be able to whisper over and over as you sink ever more deeply into its proprietress, even better than Maria Barbara, and we may be sure Bach whispered it many times, for Anna Magdalena bore him an even greater number of children than he had been left with by Maria Barbara.
But what is most enticing about Anna Magdalena, and why I sometimes whisper her name myself into this room
when I am alone here in the day and listening to the music I now call forth with my innocent remote, is her being the inspiration for a sarabande that Bach wrote down in a little notebook.
Clara writes things down in little notebooks too. Not music. Private things. She records her life and fantasies in a handwriting that is such a salmagundi of slashes and dots and scars and the amputation of abbreviation that it is literally cryptographic and therefore leaves her life and mind indecipherable to anyone who might be so crude as to attempt to violate her diaries.
Only on the day of our first meeting was I privileged to see what sort of thing she records in those pages. Since that day, I have not even peeked, though I find it more difficult as time goes by and we consume one another within the fire of our marriage not to want to see her in those pages, to experience her mind and history apart from how we live our lives together.
The closer we become in our marriage, the more a stranger she seems to me and the more a stranger I seem to myself. It is as if our separate identities were being erased by the very thing that secures our identities. I am losing Clara even as she becomes more a part of myself. I am losing myself not simply as I become more a part of her but also as I lose her. When there is no difference between gain and loss, the result is not stability but chaos.
It is ascertainable even in our lovemaking now, which approaches masturbation in its familiarity and inspires aprosexia, as it were, in the very midst of sex, driving us to push one another away in order to be closer, to become strangers in order to remain confidants, to pretend we are not who we are as we claw at each other's skin and minds on that bed there.
I do not want to read Clara's diaries in order to know her better. Quite the opposite. I want to read them in order to know her less well, to be able to say, “My word, this is not the woman I know,” and thereby to find myself wanting her even more than I do. After four years of marriage, I discover it is necessary to recreate the person I know best and love best. This cannot be done without her collaboration, however tacit. But I have promised not to read what she has written. And so, in order to strengthen our marriage and deepen my love for my wife, I must someday betray it and her.