For the beauty of the earth

The divine can express itself by implication. Not reacting, not being triggered into judgment: these are ways to be present, too. They're oddly noticed in retrospect; they don't shout out "presence" while they're happening. When listening to music, this is the feeling I get when everything is played seamlessly and at the same time with little need for emotion. The notes themselves are enough, like when the sun on my face and sand in my toes are good enough, or a ham on rye, or walking past my neighbors' houses.

Andras Schiff has the attitude to find the divine in the everyday and ordinary. As a conductor he is courtly and pulls seamlessness out of the orchestra. As a pianist he is inside the geometry and plain sense of Bach. I didn't lose myself in emotion last night at the San Francisco Symphony. I lost myself in an appreciation of the orderliness of life.

Sometimes I think that since Blood on the Tracks, Dylan's love songs have been dissecting a single past love over and over, more delicately and narrowly as he descends deeper into it. Bach is like that for me. It's as if he found a single leaf, and started looking at the perfect geometry in its structure and near-infinite variability in that geometry as it fractaled under a microscope, and he transcribed the ways of the leaf in one composition after another.

Here's part of one of the pieces Schiff played last night, in a recording with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra:

Music is my primary companion now. I'm uneasy about that, but getting used to it. Orchestral music allows me to feel the humanity of dozens of players finding agreement on what is true, what is now, what is present. Sitting in the cheap seats overlooking the orchestra from behind, I have a beautiful window into the players' intense work. The Rolling Stones wrote a simple tune of gratitude called We Love You. I feel that love from the orchestra. I saw Furthur play it once; here's a recording of another time they played it: