NOT SENT
November 14, 2022
Dear Benjamin,

Please excuse this follow-up letter so close on the heels of its predecessor.
I probably repeat myself when I explain that for years now, I have cultivated
the habit of writing down what is on my mind "in real time", which is to say
synchronously with the initial occurrence of the thought. All the more as
I get older and my mind weakens, I consider it inefficient and wasteful to 
try to store in memory, ideas to be expressed in writing at some uncertain date
in the future. However, the circumstance that I must write in order to stay 
intellectually afloat does not obligate you to reply. In fact, you do not 
need to give my letters a thought, or even to read them. Over the years
I have become proficient in writing to myself.

When I wrote to you yesterday, I was meditating not only on the religious
verses which Bach set to music but also the well-meaning paternal advice
with which Polonius gave to Hamlet's friend Laertes who was about to leave
for France.
 
"Yet here, Laertes! Aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stayed for. There, my blessing with thee. 
And these few precepts in thy memory 
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue, 
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel,
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade. Beware 
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, 
Bear't that the opposèd may beware of thee. 
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. 
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, 
But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy,
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be, 
For loan oft loses both itself and friend, 
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. 
This above all — to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day, 
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell. My blessing season this in thee!"

I've long considered Polonius'speech as an epitome of the ambiguity
of language. When he berates Laertes' procrastination in setting off
for France, Polonius is playing a role which casts a shadow 
over his purported affection for his son.
Polonius' eloquent pieties
mouthed on the cusp of the catastrophes
about to engulf not only him but also his two children.
I consider to be the epitome of tragic irony.
Polonius strikes me as the quintessential Hallmark father. 

Testimonials about "What Bach Cantatas mean to me" are doomed to sound
like echoes of the exhortations of Polonius.
With the letter I wrote to you yesterday, 
I tried to shift the burden of such pieties about Bach's religious music
to the contributors of the "Bach Cantata Website".

Bach's music constituted the religion of my parents with which I grew up,
and they often alluded to the mystery of how the sanctity of the text and 
the holiness of the music that amplifies it might be related.
Given the forceful impression which Bach's music makes on me,
this ios aquestion which I have had years to consider.

My present interpretation is that Bach was no evangelist.
He was not the promoter of edifying religious experience.
Bach was a musician, 
a keyboard artist and a composer who needed a market,
who needed a patron for his compositions 
and an audience for his performances.
The Protestant churches
for which music was an essential instrument of liturgy 
competed with the secular authorities,
the princes and princelings of the city-states
for Bachs services.
I assume, without further evidence, 
that to be Cantor of the Thomaskirche
and the Director of the Thomanerchor
were the most prestigious and remunerative available positions.
He composed the music and staged the performances which were expected of him.
The relationship between the text and the music, between the words and the
notes is sometimes inescapably immediate, as for example in the
St Matthew Passion, the expression of Peters sobbing: "und weinete
bitterlich", contrasting with the expression of laugher: (BWV 205)
Wie will ich lustig lachen,
Wenn alles durcheinandergeht!
Other examples of tonal painting that come to mind
are duets of solo violins suggesting the beating wings of birds in flight,
the depiction of silence by a stream of rests separated by quarter notes,
the counting of the passage of time by a stream of quarter notes separated
by rests.

Many of the religious texts that Bach set 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picander
Picanders Ernst=Schertzhaffte und Satyrische Gedichte 
Dritter Theil Leipzig 1732
Serious facetious and satyrical Poems Volume Three Leipzig 1732
I don't have access to volumes one and two, but have no reason to
suspect that they convey a different message.

I cannot try to explain my understanding of the reputedly "sacred"
or religious qualities of Bachs music without referring to my home-brewed
theology, to the effect that deity is that "imaginary" conceptual locus 
where the subjective inadequacies and imperatives of otherwise isolated
individuals intersect; a figure inaccesible like the square root of minus
one.

SDG == MGGA == MAGA
soli deo gloria == make God great again == Make America great again
where God is the subjective We. The subjective Community is the Nation,
i.e. America. When I shout MAGA, I demand that the Nation confirm,
reflect and endorse who I am, my individuality, my subjectivity.
The God "within" (of the ancient, medieval, baroque and contemporary
mystivs is a paradox, is a conundrum, of much dialectical consequence.

The dialectic of "classical" mechanics and quantum mechanics is a reflection, 
a description not of the world outside but of the world within me.
Does Zeno's arrow move from its string to its target stepwise or continuously,
or like the elementary particles?