A gust of wind. The woman's wig flies off and spins across the supermarket car park like a cartwheeling cat. The man gives chase. Ha ha. Funny. Except that I am the man and the woman is my wife, and she is crushed. She stands, rooted, hands on her baby-bald head, eyes welling. "Don't worry, Mum," my son reassures. "No one saw." Later, in the middle of the night, I lie suspended between resolve and despair. My wife is asleep. Her skin smells faintly of chemotherapy. I am listening, through earphones, to music so simple and profound that resolve and despair dissolve away. Now, more than two years later, we smile at the image of the cartwheeling cat. I can re-run the scene with relative detachment, but I can't listen to Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel without a ghostly lightening of my bones.
I came to know Pärt's music through Fraser, a rock climber who liked to climb solo without a rope. "Deathbed music," he grinned, handing me a recording of Tabula Rasa. It was, he claimed, popular with the dying. I listened and saw why. The simple patterns and progressions, the mysterious tones, and the perfect, unresolved silence at the end of the second movement seemed to lead close to the edge of being. This was solvent for the soul. Since falling from the great limestone wall at Malham Cove, dropping among the Sunday strollers on a summer's afternoon, Fraser had journeyed in and out of existence. His current self was not the original. His employer didn't think so, and nor did his wife, but he was doing fine with a part-time job and a new girlfriend. The brain injury had dislocated him physically, mentally and socially, but he had reassembled himself in modified form and was happy enough with the new configuration. Music had been the blueprint and the glue. Through music he found connection with his old self, and reconciliation with the new. He gave me a cassette—a quasi-random compilation of musical flotsam drifting from the wreckage of his brain: Bach, I remember; Rautavaara, I think; Coltrane; Led Zeppelin ("Nobody's Fault but Mine"); and the deathbed music of Arvo Pärt. Of course, it was anything but random. It charted the journey from Fraser one to Fraser two.
Ethnomusicologists point to the collective functions of music: its use in ritual and ceremony; its contribution to the continuity and stability of cultures. Singing and dancing draw people together, synchronising emotions, bonding the group in empathy and reflection or in preparation for action. The power of music lies beyond language and intellect. As the late Anthony Storr suggested, it derives from an emotional need for communication with other humans that is prior to the need for conveying objective information or exchanging ideas. But there is something prior even to that. Music goes deeper: it perfuses the body. It oils the wheels of our most primitive mental machineries, those systems of emotion, bodily sensation and action that constitute the "core self"—the embodied self of the present moment. Without coherence at this level there is no possibility of developing a stable personal identity or social relationships. Perhaps that is one of the basic functions of music: to tune the engines of self-awareness. I can't believe, as Steven Pinker seems to, that music is mere "auditory cheesecake" with no primary adaptive function.
I once took a postgraduate music student to visit Fraser. She was writing a thesis on music and brain damage. It is unusual to see brain injury intensifying a passion for music. The opposite is usually the case. Fraser asked what she was planning to do when she finished her PhD and she told him she was going to train as an accountant. He made coffee and showed us photographs of his rescue from Malham Cove and cuttings from the local newspaper. He had no recollection of losing his footing, or even of being on the limestone wall. The days before and after the fall were lost to conscious recall. Oddly though, his body remembered. He said he wanted to see the spot where his old self had died and so had recently returned to the Yorkshire Dales. As he left Malham village and entered the biblical landscape of the cove ("It's like the Garden of Eden") he felt a churning of the gut. He followed the beck to within 100 yards of the great cliff but could go no further. His legs wouldn't take him. That was the last time I saw him. "Do you think I should try again?" "Why not?" I replied. "But stay off the wall."
I listen to music for three or four hours every day, at home, at work and in the car. These words are spilling out to the bright sounds of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. I rarely listen to Spiegel im Spiegel these days, and although I sometimes yield to the ego-dissolving beauty of Pärt's other great works, I ration my intake. It's good to look in the mirror and find someone there once in a while. Ethereal is fine, but there's nothing wrong with a bit of visceral. This past week I've been listening to a Small Faces CD I bought for £2.99 at the Co-op. Our strongest musical memories are laid down between the ages of eight and 12 years. I turn the volume up to pain threshold on the car stereo and am transported to the dawn of puberty. Picked her up on a Friday night—Sha-la-la-la-lee-yeah. That's more like it.
