It is not often that one finds me in a refined moment. In fact, on one of the few occasions that this might occur, I am usually cooking wads of greasy pork, aka sausages or bacon, runny eggs and fat-smeared toast. That is, at Sunday breakfast, when WORT in Madison, usually a megaphone for far-left causes, plays ancient and near-ancient music on a program they call Musica Antigua. Most of the known music from the Middle Ages is religious, as much of life for pre-industrial man was dominated by religion, and would cause Karl Marx and his troops of merry malcontents chronic heart, if not soul, burn, but they play such music anyway and it is often great. So there one might find me, in rapture over old high- mass classics, while bacon bursts spatter my baggy blue sweatpants.
I might even raise a pinky finger during some songs, those which are most class- conscious, which I probably did during the playing of a wedding song written for a Medici scion in the mid- 15th century during the Italian Renaissance, just decades away from Columbus’s voyage. I believe this event to be one of the greatest disrupters of Old Europe, but even if not so, it occurred during the transition from the ancient ways to the new, for better and for worse. The Medici’s navigated between these worlds, the family full of a need for power and wealth, while funding some of the greatest classical religious works of art and architecture in all European history. Florence stands in glorious testimony to this, as did the wedding song that I heard as I turned the eggs over easy.
It is simplicity itself, calling back to the shared human nostalgia for childhood innocence, but demanding of the most delicate touches from the musicians. It brought to mind flowers in spring, and with that, I was brought to picture that wedding, undoubtedly taking place in some enormous and beautiful cathedral under the aegis of a Cardinal or even Pope. All or most of the higher clerics were political then, full of schemes and often full of violence, but on that occasion, framed by the music and the Catholic splendor, my bet is that they had suspended those grinding wheels of plotting, allowing all who believed – and most did – to live their belief on earth as they might hope to live in heaven, suspended for a short time in peace and beauty and well-being.
Such were my thoughts, my raised pinky forgotten, when this occurred to me: what would the Medici bride and groom think of my ‘attendance’ at their wedding? Part would concern class, as that was so important then, and here I was, a greasy peasant hearing the most intimate of music meant only for noble ears. But other reactions would be beyond calculation. How could they imagine recorded sound, the harnessing of electrical energy, the ubiquitous presence of a technology that for them would be beyond price – on a continent that they did not know existed? How could they imagine my thoughts and contexts that involved landing on the moon and getting high at a Grateful Dead concert, both alien, one unbelievable, the other repugnant? How could they imagine any of it? Yet here it was, so plan, so ordinary to me and to us. A nothing.
I found later that there is something more to this exercise, one in which the Medicis could participate. I was looking out the window down at our tangled late-season garden, golden rod growing up between withered stalks of corn and huge yellowing leaves of squash, and saw my wife Vicki bending down among the tomato and pepper plants. She was getting the last and best of them because the first real frost was forecasted for that night, which would certainly kill the delicate pepper plants at the very least. By her side was our mutt Katie, which looked something like a border collie with short hair, her nose ducking up and down between the plants, apple and pear trees rising higher behind her, and the turning leaves of a hickory far higher still behind those. She was boon companion to Vicki, neither thinking anything of the situation or their exact place in the world at that moment, and it struck me suddenly with intense poignancy that this was a moment to remember. It captured the changing of seasons, the work involved with things human and the turning over of that in nature which is not ours, as well as the intimacy of living creatures caught in time. She was working from and for the house, the dog for her, the garden an affair of months of work from every one of us, all that and more speaking of our life and our feelings in this one place and time in Wisconsin that was as precious, as full of meaning, as any painting or work of art or song in a cathedral.
Here is where the Medicis could understand us. They must have grasped the importance of their wedding, no doubt thinking it a grander thing than it was in the great scheme of things, but did they see themselves as the passing shadows in this timeless world that they were? They probably did not, but they could have, just as we can. It is something that we all share, or should share, and it is something that can stop us in our tracks. We don’t make the grand moments of life, but simply come to recognize them, or not. The wedding song may be remembered far longer than the wedding company, that time standing alone on the beach more than the rock concert of the night before, the family members in the garden more than the produce or anything else of the moment. These things are important because they make you realize what you are. They do not entertain or excite, but tell you in a language deeper than words what it is to be living, and what it is that you do not usually understand about living.
For me, such moments leave me on the edge of something mysterious, something that is beyond me but which I know I must ponder. It is being itself. Frozen in a snap of time, such stillness confounds us as few actions can. Art, song, monumental works of architecture, all must have this quality to be great. They must be able to capture what anyone can find in one still moment when the most familiar becomes a precious portal to self and all that lies beyond. This might be our greatest gift, the most simple of all, the one that brings us closest to the angels who live in glory through nothing more than praising what they so clearly see before them.
It is not often that one finds me in a refined moment. In fact, on one of the few occasions that this might occur, I am usually cooking wads of greasy pork, aka sausages or bacon, runny eggs and fat-smeared toast. That is, at Sunday breakfast, when WORT in Madison, usually a megaphone for far-left causes, plays ancient and near-ancient music on a program they call Musica Antigua. Most of the known music from the Middle Ages is religious, as much of life for pre-industrial man was dominated by religion, and would cause Karl Marx and his troops of merry malcontents chronic heart, if not soul, burn, but they play such music anyway and it is often great. So there one might find me, in rapture over old high- mass classics, while bacon bursts spatter my baggy blue sweatpants.
I might even raise a pinky finger during some songs, those which are most class- conscious, which I probably did during the playing of a wedding song written for a Medici scion in the mid- 15th century during the Italian Renaissance, just decades away from Columbus’s voyage. I believe this event to be one of the greatest disrupters of Old Europe, but even if not so, it occurred during the transition from the ancient ways to the new, for better and for worse. The Medici’s navigated between these worlds, the family full of a need for power and wealth, while funding some of the greatest classical religious works of art and architecture in all European history. Florence stands in glorious testimony to this, as did the wedding song that I heard as I turned the eggs over easy.
It is simplicity itself, calling back to the shared human nostalgia for childhood innocence, but demanding of the most delicate touches from the musicians. It brought to mind flowers in spring, and with that, I was brought to picture that wedding, undoubtedly taking place in some enormous and beautiful cathedral under the aegis of a Cardinal or even Pope. All or most of the higher clerics were political then, full of schemes and often full of violence, but on that occasion, framed by the music and the Catholic splendor, my bet is that they had suspended those grinding wheels of plotting, allowing all who believed – and most did – to live their belief on earth as they might hope to live in heaven, suspended for a short time in peace and beauty and well-being.
Such were my thoughts, my raised pinky forgotten, when this occurred to me: what would the Medici bride and groom think of my ‘attendance’ at their wedding? Part would concern class, as that was so important then, and here I was, a greasy peasant hearing the most intimate of music meant only for noble ears. But other reactions would be beyond calculation. How could they imagine recorded sound, the harnessing of electrical energy, the ubiquitous presence of a technology that for them would be beyond price – on a continent that they did not know existed? How could they imagine my thoughts and contexts that involved landing on the moon and getting high at a Grateful Dead concert, both alien, one unbelievable, the other repugnant? How could they imagine any of it? Yet here it was, so plan, so ordinary to me and to us. A nothing.
I found later that there is something more to this exercise, one in which the Medicis could participate. I was looking out the window down at our tangled late-season garden, golden rod growing up between withered stalks of corn and huge yellowing leaves of squash, and saw my wife Vicki bending down among the tomato and pepper plants. She was getting the last and best of them because the first real frost was forecasted for that night, which would certainly kill the delicate pepper plants at the very least. By her side was our mutt Katie, which looked something like a border collie with short hair, her nose ducking up and down between the plants, apple and pear trees rising higher behind her, and the turning leaves of a hickory far higher still behind those. She was boon companion to Vicki, neither thinking anything of the situation or their exact place in the world at that moment, and it struck me suddenly with intense poignancy that this was a moment to remember. It captured the changing of seasons, the work involved with things human and the turning over of that in nature which is not ours, as well as the intimacy of living creatures caught in time. She was working from and for the house, the dog for her, the garden an affair of months of work from every one of us, all that and more speaking of our life and our feelings in this one place and time in Wisconsin that was as precious, as full of meaning, as any painting or work of art or song in a cathedral.
Here is where the Medicis could understand us. They must have grasped the importance of their wedding, no doubt thinking it a grander thing than it was in the great scheme of things, but did they see themselves as the passing shadows in this timeless world that they were? They probably did not, but they could have, just as we can. It is something that we all share, or should share, and it is something that can stop us in our tracks. We don’t make the grand moments of life, but simply come to recognize them, or not. The wedding song may be remembered far longer than the wedding company, that time standing alone on the beach more than the rock concert of the night before, the family members in the garden more than the produce or anything else of the moment. These things are important because they make you realize what you are. They do not entertain or excite, but tell you in a language deeper than words what it is to be living, and what it is that you do not usually understand about living.
For me, such moments leave me on the edge of something mysterious, something that is beyond me but which I know I must ponder. It is being itself. Frozen in a snap of time, such stillness confounds us as few actions can. Art, song, monumental works of architecture, all must have this quality to be great. They must be able to capture what anyone can find in one still moment when the most familiar becomes a precious portal to self and all that lies beyond. This might be our greatest gift, the most simple of all, the one that brings us closest to the angels who live in glory through nothing more than praising what they so clearly see before them.
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