Memory or Communion Eternal?

 

Part 1

By Ralph Karow

 

Last month one of my closest friends for over 40 years entered life eternal. John was only a few months younger than me and was diagnosed with early-onset dementia 5 years ago. I was having weekly “facetime” calls with him and sadly watched him fade away during that time. Calls for the past few months were only possible with his wife as a go-between. His slide from home to hospice came on rather suddenly and unexpectedly. Also unexpected is that I feel closer to him now that he’s passed on than I have in probably the past 10 years. I’m saying 10 years because that’s when I think I started noticing him becoming more irritable, dissatisfied, and possibly even a little disenchanted. Things like that don’t end a connection like ours, but they do add an element of concern and desire to get to the root of whatever was bugging him and fix it. To remove the discord from the harmony we used to share.

I spent the past year putting together a book likening the Body of Christ to a perichoresis of perfectible harmony. Life on earth began as nearly indistinct bacteria that didn’t just “somehow” conglomerate into highly complex individual cells that further evolved into bodily form. They evolved in harmony with one another while transfiguring the planet’s gaseous cloud and dusty surface into an interdependent atmosphere and biosphere in the process. From there, it’s not a far stretch to imagine oneself as nothing more than an individual cell, which … if it’s striving to be perfect, as the heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48) … is the tiniest participant in a process transfiguring mere biological existence into the compassionate and sagacious mediating Body of Christ: a living and essential ingredient in a perichoresis of perfectible harmony.

I like the idea of each of us being “cells of a living body” better than “stones of a temple.” Either analogy works, but since we pray for God to remove our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh, I think we need the change in perspective from stone to cell. Plus, while the mortar of the law holds stones together, the commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and you neighbor[ing cells] as yourself is what binds the cells of Christ’s Body.

From that perspective, now that John has entered life eternal, he’s no more “a static John” of a certain age and demeanor now than he was a static entity at the 5-year, 10-year, or anywhere else within the 40+ years that I’ve known him. What he is, is the “dynamic and still-living John” who is as much my neighbor in the eternal Body of Christ now as he ever was. That makes me wonder, though: what constitutes dynamic and still living? Sitting on a cloud playing a harp? Something of Dante’s imaginings? I get the feeling it’s neither. To start with, if there is a God, then John would be playing a vintage Les Paul, not a harp. I’m not entirely joking when I say that. I’d expect nothing less than an upgrade in the instrument … y’know, being heaven and all … if we are to continue on an arc of perfectibility. The instrument I have in mind, though, is our physical body, which acts as an interface between our inner sensibilities and our outer expressions. Considering that our physical bodies are left behind when we enter eternal life, I’m inclined to believe that the upgrade will be for our inner sensibilities to directly interact with others without any of the perceptual distortions and temporal lags inherent in operating the instrument of our physical bodies.

Music is what drew John and me together. He wanted to do something other than classical music for a performance class he was in. He wanted to put together a jazz octet. At the time, the college didn’t have a jazz program, so he recruited people outside the music department, including me on keyboards. Other problems were that he could only find 5 people for the octet, and none of us knew how to play jazz. This was the first time John pushed me to go beyond myself to find solutions. I solved the people problem by naming it the “5/8ths Jazz Octet.” The problem of what to actually play fell into place when something I was noodling around with on the piano caught his ear and he asked me to work it into a tune. Jazz/rock fusion wasn’t an interest of mine at the time, but it did end up being a lot of fun … for us. The department, on the other hand, disapproved, and that should have been the end of our collaborations at Hofstra.

Two years later, however, John needed to perform three classical pieces in an end-of-year recital for his scholarship. He had selected two pieces and just couldn’t think of a third. As luck would have it, the Guggenheim was having a “works in progress” lecture/demonstration with Pat Metheny and Steve Reich—at that time, John’s favorite guitarist and my favorite composer, respectively. They were working on a piece for 8 prerecorded guitar tracks and live performer. As we were headed home I said I was disappointed and thought I could do better. John replied “If you write something, I’ll play it at the recital.” And so, I wrote my first piece of classical music. Well … late 20th-century classical music, which gives a lot of leeway. I don’t think I did any better than Steve, but considering I didn’t really know what I was doing and had to go with my gut rather than my head, it came out pretty well. John, too, was basically unfamiliar with what I threw at him. He knew sheet music and chords and charts, whereas from me he got a lot of squiggles, verbal descriptions, and melodic fragments to assemble on tape and then figure out how to count out the live part.

We both had to dig deep to put this thing together. I needed to think how to put what I was hearing inside my head on paper so he could create an external representation. He, at the other end of things, had to feel what he saw and read without thinking about techniques and known patterns, since he was very much out of his element. But if there’s a point here, it’s not in the piece of music per se. Stripping the waves of sound away, what you find is nothing but spirit and faith. As a composer, the best I can do is jot down notes that best convey the spirit of what I’m hearing. When I revisit a piece of music years later and feel it needs revisions, what is that other than getting closer to the spirit of the music by revising the law of its notation? And there’s also faith in the performer to bring out the spirit embedded in the law. Practice and rehearsals are little more than meditations on the law in order to immerse oneself in the spirit.

I don’t remember anything about the performance of this piece; who I went with, where I sat, or what the reaction was, but I vividly remember the hours we spent in the studio putting the tracks together and trying to get to the heart of the music. I had absolute faith in John to find and bring out depths of the music that I was unaware of. And he must’ve had at least some faith that the notation I presented him with was worth his time (and reputation and grade). What we were both after, however, was the spirit of the music, and the only way we could get to that was by aligning our inner sensibilities. Words, gestures, and analogies weren’t enough to get the job done. Something was happening at a level of intuition that anyone who’s ever played in a band or sung in a small choir knows all too well: a communion of spirit.

Until now, I thought that spirit was what was missing in our weekly facetime calls. I knew his spirit was still in there somewhere, but never felt any connection. But maybe that’s because I was only trying to connect through our established patterns and remembrances. That was the John I remembered, the John I knew how to relate to, and who knew me so well that word and gesture could take on broader and deeper meaning based on shared experience. Of course, as his memory and attention span deteriorated all of that vanished, yet I could tell he was still in there somewhere. And as frustrating as it must have been for him to try to relate and express himself, in retrospect I wonder if part of that frustration (in the later stages) was in having to relate in a manner suited to us non-dementia folk.

I’m speaking strictly from the perspective of a person calling once a week at a set time so as to establish a routine. Obviously, those who saw him in person, especially who were with him on an extended basis, will have different feelings and might completely disagree with what I’m about to say. But as a contemplative musician more concerned with eternity than temporality I can’t help but feel that as John’s mind was being forced to let go its temporal connections, he needed to reorient himself to something “other.” I can easily imagine an internal battle between clinging to the life he knew and venturing toward an “other,” and I found myself utterly incapable of suggesting, let alone fostering, an orientation to life eternal: remnants of the same helplessness I felt when I was a daily visitor to my father in a nursing home after he suffered a stroke.

Click here to see John's performance at his classical recital.

(To be continued)