God, Music, Language, Art

Given the notion of a creator God, it can easily be guessed that it--this creator-god--would communicate with its creation, yes? One might imagine a less collaborative deity, I suppose, one that just exists, theistically, and that was the view of many of our own founding fathers. That view, however, seems such a blind alley. A creator without the interplay, the teamwork, of its individual creations, that is just a stifling thought.

So what would this communication be like? Would it be in language, in words, that men use? How could words work to convey the mesh of a creator’s inner-workings? Can language hold that much meaning? Even if so, the best language can do is to hold it within one language at one time. Anyone who has attempted the fool’s errand of translation knows how impossible it is. But I guess it is possible for a creator to speak in one language. Maybe he chose Hebrew, then Greek and Aramaic. But what of the native tribes out there? Where is their Bible? What of the Slav’s and the Chinese (all eight different linguistic groups with their many different dialects), and the Saxon and the German and the Romance languages and the Asian-Tibetan and Viet and African language groups? What is “The Bible” to them?

It gets worse: What is the Bible for the trees? The shrubbery, the grasses? Don’t laugh: a creator would treat all its creation as its children, yes? What is the language meshwork for the fungi and the potato?

Perhaps it isn’t in language at all. Maybe that is a blind alley.

Perhaps it is in music. Listen to Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Opus 135. Is that a communication by our creator? Is the sound of a chord played by a concert symphony the sound of God [Now, I've heard there was a secret chord / That David played, and it pleased the Lord /But you don't really care for music, do you?]? What is this creator-god saying to us? What happens when we attempt to “translate” the joyful sound of a Mahler Symphony into words? Or any music into words?

It is impossible, as absolute music is...absolute. It registers as emotion, not rationality. How many wars would not have been waged had we heard the voice of a creator in music, instead of words? How many acts of terror avoided?

Not to say that this creator wouldn’t have used words as well. But not words as historical artifact, not words as descriptions: that kind of language does not hold enough power. I cannot envision a creator-god of the universe describing the comings and goings of some small group of people.

But language as poetry, with the artful techniques that can be employed by people of genius, that I can envision. That’s possible. I think of works like The Song of Solomon, Psalm 23, the Gospel of John, but also of The Brothers Karamazov, Don Quixote, King Lear, Hamlet, and countless individual poems and stories. These are like music; they cannot be translated (at least, they cannot be translated without another genius who creates in that translation another great work of art--an entirely different work of art). They cannot be distilled into some summary of rationality. They are of a whole, indivisible as works of art must be.

The music of art allows us to hear this communication with a creator; we can call it spirit, we can call it any number of things. When you hear it you feel it, and once you feel it, you can know it.

Here is an exercise some might want to entertain: After watching a movie with a wonderful score (I suggest Gladiator, or The Last of the Mohicans), listen to just the score. As you do, don’t you re-track the movie? Don’t you re-examine it, see it, feel it? The weight of the movie’s core is within the score, held in the notes, the melodies, the harmonies. The remaining parts of the film, the plot, the actors, the cinematography, seem excess, seem dross: as the skeleton falls away we hold onto the essence of the movie. The Bible is like that, too. If we could scrape the literalness away, we could feel the essence remaining; we could slough off the silly notions of historicity and literal inerrancy and just feel what remains at the core.

What prevents us from understanding is the literal word. It hinders in its walling off of possible connections, possible meanings, possible...possibles. It is the impossibility of language--its inevitable failure at conveying total communication of any idea--that opens the door to spiritual connectedness. This is what the genius does when he writes great works of art, great poems, great stores. He takes the failure of language, its cracks, its broken pieces, and molds something that conveys great emotional meaning: the lie that language tells gives way to a spiritual truth. The closer language comes to music, in the way it can hold truth and experience closer due to the brokenness of itself, to allowing the music of a truth to fill in the cracks in language,  the closer it becomes possible to see, and feel, what it is we really are.