I may be achieving a breakthrough. Or possibly I’m losing my mind. Or it could be the new medication I just started taking…
I got up this morning to put in my two hours of writing (okay, it’s more like an hour and a half when I deduct bathroom and tea-making time). Then I went to the gym, as usual. And while I was driving there, I had this epiphany. It rose, I’m pretty sure, partly from the lingering effects of reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. And from Mark Helprin’s Paris In the Present Tense, which I’m re-reading. It’s a novel about a musician, with all kinds of metaphysical implications.
Anyway, it occurred to me that (as best I understand physics, which is probably not as well as I think) the universe is made up of atoms, which are made up of particles and charges and empty space and stuff. Every solid thing is actually just energy in motion. What makes things exist is movement and attraction and repulsion and waves and so on.
In other words, the universe is music.
Which works just fine with my theology. The Bible says that God said, “Let there be light.” The light – energy – was spoken by God. Light is energy in a pattern. That’s pretty much like music.
Tolkien used this metaphor in The Silmarillion.
After I thought, “The Fall introduced discord into the music,” I found myself shouting out loud (in my car): “CHRIST RESOLVED THE CHORD!”
Well, it seemed profound to me at the time.
Of course I used this space not long ago to explicate a theory that the universe is a Story.
So which is it, Walker?
Maybe the universe is a ballad. No metaphor is every perfect.
Above, a little music from that most theological of composers, the Lutheran J. S. Bach.
As an amateur musician I cannot love this enough. “Christ resolved the chord” may be the quote of the year!
James Gaines’s book Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment has a fine passage.
Gaines explains that an Enlightenment-era composer wrote to please his audience. As a Dresden Kapellmeister of that time said, music is supposed to be “popular and pleasing to the reasonable world” (cited on p. 220). Hence the agreeable galant style, which is still nice for background music on a relaxed Saturday morning along with freshly-brewed coffee and a croissant.
But for those steeped, like Bach, in the pre-Enlightenment “elaborated codes and principles” of counterpoint, in canon and fugue, the Pythagorean and Boethian quest of music was a far more searching endeavor. Gaines writes: the “learned composer’s job was to attempt to replicate in earthly music the celestial harmony with which God had joined and imbued the universe, and so in a way to take part in the act of Creation itself” (p. 47). That is what Bach did.
Gaines says that (by its contrast with perhaps charming but superficial Enlightenment music) “Bach’s Musical Offering leaves us… a compelling case for the following proposition: that a world without a sense of the transcendent and mysterious, a universe ultimately discoverable through reason alone, can only be a barren place; and that the music sounding forth from such a world might be very pretty, but it can never be beautiful” (p. 12). Conversely, what “is greatest about Bach’s work is literally impossible to talk about, a characteristic that perhaps more than any other distinguishes his music from the galant” (p. 240).