“Cello concerto no. 1 in A minor- Camille Saint Saens”
The cellist strolled in and bowed before he sat down. Taking a deep breath, he instantaneously dove headfirst with an aggression of passionately ripping something apart; like a tide suddenly withdrawing before a tsunami, ripping me out into open water.
I held my breath, caught off guard by the intensity and emotion spurred in me involuntarily. Symphonies, I had thought, are subdued, sleepy, thoughtful. I hadn’t gone to a symphony since I was a child, and it was as if a heavy bell had been rung and the vibrations reverberated deeply through every calcified quantity of my core, striking a depth inside of myself previously untouched. The cellist played a melody and then echoed the series of notes in a lower octave, so suddenly, in a deeper somber cry like an answer to its own question. It ripped something right out of me, I couldn’t even say what.
All that was calcified inside me shattered, and grew unceasingly, like something dehydrated absorbing water again and expanding, erupting in an outpour that rolled down my cheeks. Something great had burst forth out of this melodic overwhelm, so suddenly and so quietly. The notes came quickly and unrelenting, as it got greater I had to hold my breath. The Cellist gasped shortly as he played like he was crying. It looked so intimate, like he was praying, or preaching, or speaking alone with God. He played as if he wasn’t performing for hundreds of people, but alone with his instrument. It felt as if I was imposing on something so deeply personal that I almost felt I should look away.
Occasionally he would send up a single, extended high note and look up above him as if he was reaching for something; using his music to get to God, to find him or catch him — stringing together his notes like a fisherman, to throw up above and wait for a pull. The high notes under that grand, tall ceiling seemed to represent the Divine; something beautiful, unreachable, and the collective audience under the weight of a heavy ocean, watching the notes rise up to the light past a gradient of gradual subsiding blue. The cellist on the center stage, so pitifully alone; a fisherman, a translator, a priest.
The lower notes seemed to rattle in my bones, vibrate in my throat, in frequencies attuned to the human body. The lower notes sang Humanity, all things reachable and known. The transition between the low and high notes, and all the melodies in between, seemed to be a gradient connecting Human to Divine. There is no way not to feel humbled, and a bit ashamed, under a ceiling that high; the gilded ornate above admired from far below, and touched only by the highest notes sent up from center stage, the lower notes reverberating in our modest bodies at the floor of the musical terrarium.
I’ve been told the cello has the same range as a human voice. In this way for me it feels like a metaphor of what we can feel, because the sounds it makes we can feel in our bodies. It can evoke instinctual human emotions, from a high, delicate joy, to a deep sorrow. It’s the color range of the human spirit, a translating tool for spirit to soul, into a melody, an experience.
The deeper notes seemed to reach into the depths of every flavor of melancholy I have ever felt; to recall all the sadness that has made me human, and color it a gradual, paler blue, with each recall of the melody, guiding and painting the emotions inside me that it was also excavating.
The whole piece seemed to be construed of a translation, a connection to the divine and an echo of a God made understandable in its repetition in a lower tone, like breaking complex concepts into simpler ones. The insistence of the repetition of its one phrase, felt like the light speaking to me in ways I had never experienced in a Church.
Henry Miller said it best I think, “My whole aim in life is to get near to God, that is, to get nearer to myself. That’s why it doesn’t matter to me what road I take. But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland… [music] is the can-opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there’s a roof to your being.” (Miller, 2017)
Under the great ceiling of the symphony hall, under the grandness of the organ, the Cellist looked like he was weeping. I was trying so hard not cry I had to hold my breath. It reminded me of being at a funeral when I was 17 for someone not much older than me, and unable to contain myself with everything inside me shaking itself out. But the feeling he tore out of me was beautiful, I tasted it in my bones like a sweet wine. The deep notes sounded so raw and human, like the depths of our soul, what we can give, what we can feel, blending seamlessly into the higher notes; into the sound of something Godly and sacred, and he was weaving an experience that blended the divine and the mortal and you couldn’t pinpoint where one ended and one began. We live alone and we die alone, and we pray alone, and our God is ours alone. And the experience that the Cellist was giving to everyone was sacred and perfect, and each distinctly our own.
I was always creeping to look for God in cemeteries, and gardens, away from the rumbling of the tube and the unceasing noise of the city. There was a time, I’ve had bouts of it in London, depression intermingled with depersonalization; I sat in a warm, homely pub by a fireplace, practicing Italian, Shelter from the Storm playing in the background. And a group of strangers sat next to me, exchanging stories of how they met their partners, laughing, blushing with drink. And I would listen and tear up, thinking I felt pity for them because they really thought these things mattered; their jobs, their marriages. Didn’t they know none of it mattered? And I’d think of the irony of the physical composition of everything, at its most basic scientific form, was called ‘matter’. I would sit drinking coffee in a tube station, watch the people all rushing by, I’d see them and picture myself in their bodies putting on their clothes, kissing their partners goodbye, imagining them leaving their houses, how it smelled, what things they’d bought to keep in them. I’d lose myself in watching them, thinking I was more them than I was myself, I felt myself slowly vanishing until I couldn’t feel my body anymore. I look around in a city full of people and can simultaneously convince myself that they are all me and also that none of them are real. I’ve woken up from conscious dreams into other dreams, I’ve woken up out of reality once, completely sober. I get a constant sneaking suspicion that this isn’t any larger than a dream anyway. I’ve fallen in and out of depression enough times to know it doesn’t matter how much you love or what, there’s always an emptiness somewhere, sometime.
I think it is a universal experience, finding it harder to surrender to the good things, than to the creeping darkness that tries to swallow me up sometimes. To shut down and calcify and decay, all it takes is non-effort, a certain complacency without the courage of surrender. Ingmar Bergman explored this in Persona, overcoming disingenousness, the embarrassment, and shame, “the chasm between what you are to others and to yourself”. The innate messiness of existence, you want to escape it, by becoming mute, immobile. “But you see, reality is bloody-minded. Your hideout isn’t watertight. Life seeps in everything.” There is no escaping being, and its perceptions. There is no escaping yourself.
If we are all alone, then at least we are together in that. And when I feel myself start to go cold, in this city that can feel so heartless, I need the silence of a graveyard, or the aggressive poignant resuscitation of a symphony. Specifically the sounds of a cello, which climbs into the seat of your soul and expands there until there is nothing left inside you but you, whole and empty, achingly mortal in your bones, ethereal in spirit and full of light, until all the blue subsides.
Miller, H. (2017). Tropic of capricorn. Martino Fine Books.
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