Well Tempered

 Johann Sebastian Bach probably wrote some of the well tempered clavier during his month in prison. He snubbed a royal who didn’t want him to go work somewhere else. 

Some of the well tempered clavier was thus written in his head in likely miserable conditions. If you’ve never tried writing a fugue, under the best conditions it’s sort of like being asked to thread a needle seven different ways while blindfolded and standing on your head. 

The well tempered clavier was written before there were pianos. Purists might play it on a harpsichord or clavichord. Glenn Gould plays it like an alien who was actually Bach on another planet.

The 48 pieces come in two book volumes, I’d say 6 eight track cassettes, 4 CDs, 8 LPs and just a blip on Itunes. Each piece has a prelude and fugue demonstrating, yes indeed, a well tempered keyboard. If you start on a C and do it in major and minor and climb up the scale by half notes till B (then back to C again), all those guys sound in tune. It’s math, it’s art, it’s engineering. It’s like that scene where the Von Trapp children sing about deer and sewing. Threading a needle.

When the world is falling apart, I usually rest in the well tempered clavier. Some call it the Old Testament of music. Like “in the beginning” there was Bach. But in the same way the well tempered circle has no beginning nor end, there was music encircling our ancestors. Maybe we sang before we grunted coarse words. 

Bach just happens to tap into my own primordial goo, which seems to be located in the liminal electrical space between my atrium and ventricle and between my motor cortex and my fingers. If you notice I’m well tempered on any given day, thank Bach. 

Prison Bach especially. The guy who threw him in prison was a monstrously rich megalomaniac-JSB actually got off easy compared to some other employees who didn’t wear the proverbial red hat for the Duke of Haters. It’s a good reminder that mean people in power is just a part of the human condition. They might win a little sometimes but in the sense that not a single soul can hold back the long arc of beauty and justice, it’s a hollow victory. A deep well tempers grief with compassionate waters. A well that welcomes all. Please notice who usually gathers at the wells of the world, to tend to the thirst of their children and their community.

Please notice the helpers.

https://youtu.be/HZ_muo3BzI8?si=FNS-CCA2f2LALsYE

The Other Mother

A Poem, or Something, About Mother's Day, Neil Gaiman and Carnivals

I want to shrink inside of myself. I walk slightly askew and my waist has thickened. I gave birth once and parented thrice, I doctored entirely too much. Let me give this advice. 

Don't take me advice, but rather crawl into the hole in the wall leading to the Other Mother where you might find better, button eyes. You might find weird and wild and wise women in disguises. Women baking magic cookies. Aromatic bread rising. Enterprising

Women make poor mothers. Clara Schumann, for example, always had other things to do. The fact is your career and ovulation peak together. And even while neglecting their children, women physicians make two million dollars less than men over their time in the profession.

I will make the concession that being a doctor is not an excuse for prison kid. I did the best I could but it was never enough and Other Mother, the one I dream about, would've put the lid on the drugs and the drugs and the drugs pervading our child's beautiful body. Invading their heart.

Though they say it was not because of us, still we are broken apart. 

Other Mother might have breast fed longer, not rounding on the wards or taking exams. Time off to tickle toes. This mother's mother died just shy of 4 months of first baby's new life. Breast fed at the side of Oma's hospital bed.

So I fled from grief. Running five steps in front of sorrow, its hot breath on the nape of my neck. Big love thrown to baby, baby and baby. Happily ever after in our house by the big trees.

Mighty Other Mother in her perfection, much better than I at protection, I paled in her reflection, my kids demanded an election. Unseat the one with the screaming pager! Real mother, Shoo!

But let's keep her chocolate chip cookies and that one song she sings is pretty good too. You know, "Müde bin ich, geh zur ruh..."She is less than we expected and more than we knew. She took us to see Beyonce. 

And plays piano much too early and too often. Demands perfection but never asks enough. Too white, too worried, too hurried, too busy, too 

Unlike Other Mother. The one with just the right stuff. Like the astronauts in that movie. Like s'mores or peanut butter cups. 

Three points from mid-court, all net, no drama, Other Mama

And yet this is what you get, the one with a stenotic spine, a love of Beethoven, a wish for more and more compassion and kindness, naive and not ever influential in the way, say

The Pioneer Woman is. Or that Perfect Mother on Instagram. @OtherMotherIsBest #ButtonEyes

I would do it better if I could do it again, be the mother that the Other Mother could only dream of being. The mother my three would seal up the wall to magic for, just so they could sit in the solid world of us, made of real eyes, stinky dogs, loud pianos, parents dancing, redwood-fronded, scratched, quarter sawn oak floors for sock sliding. Like some kind of carnival ride of love. Like the Scrambler or Tilt-a-Whirl:- thrilling, nauseating, with your companions shoved up against you with the gravity of life.