Three times in the past few weeks I have found myself in tears. Three times! This is not normal for me; sadness is not my métier. A descent into tears is as unusual for my remorselessly cheerful nature as passing up a good bakery. There are reasons for grief. Reasons good enough that I need not worry about where the sadness comes from or what it means. Grief, unlike depression, tells us nothing about the quality of our life. It is rarely a mystery. We do not grieve and wonder why.
The things we value pass away, including life itself, and only by valuing nothing could we protect ourselves. But valuing nothing is no way to live. Socrates thought that all life should be a kind of preparation for death, which may be the best reason there is to think that living like Socrates probably isn’t a good idea. It’s better to value and grieve than never to value at all.
Still, grief sucks. It seizes us. Shakes us. Wrings us dry. Then lingers like an understudy in the wings, anxious for a leading role, waiting for us to fall.
And for me, at least, music is playing the role of understudy and tapping those wells of sorrow. Watching Opus (a recital by Ryuichi Sakamoto), grief came as a painful, twisting sorrow from which tears were almost a release. Driving home, listening to Bridge Over Troubled Water, it came more gently. And the first time, near the end of The Living Years, it came in a great, agonizing heaves of sorrow as if my body was retching grief. That hurt.
Perhaps music is closer to emotion than any other art can be. Rage, desire, joy, serenity. Music can capture each in ways that words cannot. Mendelssohn said about his Songs Without Words: “So much is spoken about music and so little is said. For my part, I do not believe that words suffice for such a task, and if they did, I would no longer make music…the thoughts…are not too vague to put into words but, on the contrary, are too precise.” Music cannot capture every emotion better than words — but for the simplest, rawest and most direct feelings (…grief), no words will ever resonate in our minds like a great piece of music.
Nor is it hard to see what, in Opus or Bridge or Living Years might have sung to my tears. In Opus, we are given an intimate, private piano recital. A concert with nothing but Sakamoto playing on a grand piano in an otherwise barren sound stage. You dare not look away lest you be rude. It is spare, elegant, haunting and starkly beautiful. Filmed while Sakamoto was dying of cancer, it’s also sad as hell. To watch Sakamoto will the music to emerge and struggling to get his own notes out right, notes of an almost crystalline beauty, is to witness the best reply there is to Socrates. Many of us leave the world a slightly better place. Very few of us leave behind a vapor trail of beauty. To see that struggle for beauty even while in the maw of death is see art’s answer to mortality, music’s voice for life. Yes, it made me cry. Perhaps I will watch it again in a happier time. I wonder if it will make me happy or sad? Either seems possible.
Bridge Over Troubled Waters has its own special beauty and, what’s more, is tied up with memories that must spill from one well to another close-by in my mind. I remember many years ago having brunch at Fillmore 231 (then a fine soul food restaurant in SF). There was a small jazz/gospel ensemble playing and when they asked for requests, my mother gave them Bridge. It’s not a pure gospel tune, of course, yet though they seemed momentarily non-plussed, perhaps they saw the logic and they certainly knew the song. If it’s not pure gospel, Bridge is surely gospel inflected through Paul Simon’s inventive mind. Perhaps because it wasn’t one of their common requests, they gave it a more than perfunctory performance. It was, given over French toast and grits, as perfect a cover as I have ever heard outside the concert hall. Unique, personal and yet capturing the song’s hidden essence as a spiritual. Perhaps that memory, that time, that request, as much as the song’s soaring beauty, was the catalyst to my tears. Grief comes when we see the bridge to the people we love vanishing into death.
And as for The Living Years? Well, it’s a tearjerker by design. And while it captures nothing of my own untroubled relationship to my parents, it throbs with the pain of recent loss. Some might think the song overwrought, but to my ears it just sounds honest. Art crafted from hard bricks of grief. The Living Years is centered on the generational opinions that often break us apart; and the loss we experience when we realize that words are no longer available to us. But no matter what words we have used nor even what love we have shared, the loss is much the same. Words are no longer available to us, and there are always words we’d wish to speak to those we love.
Honestly, I wish it would stop: these sudden paroxysms of anguish. Yet I doubt I have cried myself out. Grief has a half-life, but it does not follow a simple curve. It grows, does it not? Grows mighty before it peaks and then ebbs. Ebb it will. To be older is know that grief does ebb. But no matter your age, how empty is that confidence in the face of tears? As C.S. Lewis put it in A Grief Observed, “Aren’t all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won’t accept that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?”
Grief is too natural to scorn. Too necessary to repudiate. I know of no grief that bears the mark of shame. Even if we have loved badly (and we are far more likely to have badly loved than loved badly), the grief does not share in the love’s wrongness. Yet I do not wish for tears. I will not scour out tragedies to tempt them, or seek for sadness in my library of music. I find the world does enough of that without the need to search.
When grief lurks, it will find its moments and when it cannot, it will be done.