The ‘Bach’ used in this site’s name is the namesake of J. S. Bach, the well-known used car dealer. Kidding. I am referring to none other than the German musician the world knows. His name on this website is an homage and memorial for a turning point in my life. To this day the journey continues.
More than decade ago a friend introduced me to Bach’s music. Having been born and raised in the East in an environment that could not care less about Western classical music––my childhood was before Mozart-for-Babies craze––my scant knowledge of this music was thickly obscured by prejudice: such music was boring, rarefied, irrelevant, serving functions such as a telephone-on-hold music or the signal of the garbage truck coming.
An Indonesians proverb says, “What you’re not familiar with you don’t love.” It’s true in this case. I was never able to clearly hear the music until I was put in a particular mental and emotional state. That state was a severe depression that I one day just woke up into, as if I had fallen into a deep, dark pit during sleep. Yes, there were moments of depression before, and the death of a parent, but this one were to last for the next several years. In crisis and so much pain, I became increasingly, morbidly self-absorbed. I was unable to lift my eyes to see anything other than my personal story, even when it was unpleasant to look at. Personal anguish does that sometimes, turning one’s life into a Greek tragedy that entranced one’s eyes, especially because you became the very special main actor. Different, isolated, abandoned, disconnected from others, as if an ejector seat had banished me to the outer space. The outside world became impersonal: cruel and hateful.
Racing thoughts had become so unbearable that they felt physically painful. Unsuccessfully I tried every method I could think of to stop them. Everywhere I turned I seem to meet the drama of other humans, especially in art, music including. Unfortunate to my case, art likes to glorify human suffering, as if it were a more worthy source of beauty. Up to that point I had thought art to be the reservoir of human sentiments, and the more dramatic the emotions displayed in a particular work, the “deeper” or more “artistic” it was. I could not see another possibility; I was trapped in human drama.
Cut to another scene, one day I took a listen to a set of piano pieces known as the Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC). The music did not stir me emotionally, it did not dazzle me; nonetheless its friendliness, its accessibility surprised me. Nothing more, nothing less. It completely overturned my hidden assumptions about “such music.” For behind my former prejudice was the belief that I was never going to be good, smart, sophisticated enough for it, and therefore going to forever be denied a chance to get to know it. I had also presumed that when “such music” spoke to us, it should have been “loud,” an exalted experience. But here I was feeling simply invited. This is not even an accurate way to say it, for it didn’t actively usher me in. The gate between us was simply and unnoticeably opened and left opened.
No grand revelation. It did not tickle my heart. I did not hear a showcase of Bach’s personal cries and bliss. I did not hear humanity’s longings and sufferings confirmed and glorified, or even acknowledged at all. It was mind-stopping, not mind-blowing: personal stories, mine or others’, simply stopped running in my head. Despite anguish that continued for what felt to be much too long, when listening to the WTC I found my mind completely engaged in it. I found myself loving it, and for a moment, to my relief, I stopped being a drama queen. And even though my musical knowledge was minimal, with titles such as, Fugue no. 13 in F# major, I understood that this set of music was about the different keys. In other words, I heard something impersonal.
I think it was less the music itself that had such a powerful effect on my mind, but rather, the possibility that through it was introduced to me. A possibility I desperately needed to sense at the time: that the impersonal is not identical with the cruel. That the impersonal could be beautiful, and instead of opposing me, the personal, it could simply transcend it. I saw that this friendly impersonal could innocently show its glory in a way that was not dismissive and belittling to a person, who, though ignorant and immature perhaps, was nonetheless genuinely suffering. I suppose religions and pure science and philosophy have tried to show us this possibility, but then, for some reason, Bach’s music was my personal path to it. I found myself loving this music, not because I was a such a great human being with a special power for loving or listening. In fact up to that moment I thought I had lost the capacity to love at all. The way I see it, I love it, because it is loveable by nature. I think I was able to hear the music, because somehow I was lent a different pair of ears, not mine.
What I share here is a personal love story, not an argument about the power of music. My experience with love could have manifested differently, through an unusual interest in beehives, for example. But in my life, love makes itself known in and through Bach’s WTC. It marked the beginning of a life lesson about love, what I had been told since childhood in church but failed to learn. It made me think that love is willing to stoop down and speak in our individual terms and work with our individual personality. It made me think of love as grace, that we are by nature not able to love much less to create it, and yet miraculously, able to know and experience its workings in our lives.