Here’s another musical interlude for a Sunday afternoon, with an accompanying meditation, by our Israeli correspondent MC.
Fugue
by MC
Yesterday I was listening to the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565), and particularly to the fugue. A fugue is a piece of music where every other note is the same note, and Bach was particularly good at them. In the work I was listening to, at one stage there are three separate fugues going on at the same time, one on the right hand, one on the left hand and one on the pedals. The result is magnificent.
A fugue has, by definition then, a constant reference point, it revolves around the central note, much like Creation.
(fugue begins at 2:40)
I do not believe that this world got here by accident. There is a consistency that points to a design, and a designer, whether it be a bunch of godlike spaghetti or a panspermic spaceman.
Let’s call Him Ravioli.
Whoever or whatever Ravioli is, He has a bit more knowledge than we have. And He has had it for longer. He was, He is, and no doubt He will be in future. As Creator, what He created is a finely balanced truth, so finely balanced as to nurture the complexities of life as we know it.
Life forms are all built up of cells, and each cell is more complex than a Boeing Dreamliner. Not only that, but all the cells can cluster together to form multicellular structures of even greater complexity, and culminating in the self-programming structure we call mankind.
But we, mankind, do not even have the knowledge to build a cell, let alone a self-motivating intelligent cell cluster with free will.
Free will is a fascinating thing. Most people love their own free will but hate other people’s free will, and will do anything that they can to frustrate those others’ free will. Whilst this in itself is not particularly strange, the curiosity here is that we were created (or evolved) with freedom of will when the worldly pressure is for control. We should be as ants with a common aim and purpose dictated from the core, but we are not. This is impossible, but there it is.
Why on earth would a Creator want to have a creation with free will; a free will which, in most cases, is in total opposition to the will of that Creator?
Well, of course when one is the Creator of truth, lies are of no consequence, because they cannot compete with the truth. But it would be of concern if somebody were to create a parallel and competing truth.
If we take the Bible, and the Koran, and we know that one or the other is true (we don’t), how would a scientist go about ascertaining which one is true? He would use the scientific method, probably by setting up a double blind testing process to see which one actually works. The red pill and the green pill (and the placebo of atheism). The one which is most healing and beneficial we assume to be closer to the truth. The red pill won hands down.
The green pill, Islam, has had a relative amount of success if one is interested only in numbers, but this limited success is achieved by suppressing free will and by keeping green pill people captive within family, tribe and clan structures, those who stop taking the green pill are killed. Thus its effect on the greater good is negative. It typically has to parasitize off of its neighbors in order to prosper. It is a culture of desertification, ransacking, looting and killing.
The red pill, the Bible pill, gave rise to the greatest civilization yet known to mankind. The red pill was not perfect. It had its faults, the greatest of these being a failure to perceive the benefits of the red pill civilization in comparison with the others. Red pill dissidents, influence by the placebo culture, could only see the faults and the mistakes of their own pill when comparing it to the perceived imagery of the greener pill in the next valley, an image carefully cultivated by green pill-ers and placebo-ites to lure in the unwary.
The placebo has always eventually resulted in financial and physical mayhem: bankrupt societies, huge body-counts, or both.
Like a fugue, a society needs an anchor, a reference point in a moral maze, and we need to keep returning to that reference point. Free will means that we can choose our reference point, and we can also choose not to have a reference point and take the placebo. We can choose a green pill and be in bondage, or we can choose a red pill and enjoy the benefits of a successful trial. Many are choosing the red pill, and are flooding in to the red pill society hoping to benefit from its success. Unfortunately, many of those are bringing the green pills with them in their baggage. They want to live in the beneficial aura of the red pill, but to keep taking the green pill. It just does not work.
Red + Green = Brown. The pill is no longer red, and we don’t know what the brown pills do to us. There are no trial results on brown pills…
MC lives in the southern Israeli city of Sderot. For his previous essays, see the MC Archives.
The brown pills are what a self-defecating society takes; as Steyn once wrote, mixing any amount of dog [excrement] into a tub of vanilla ice cream is bound to change the flavour for the worse.
We are simultaneously being told/scolded for being an intolerant society of bigots and haters and to “fix” us, thousands of supremacist bigots and haters and brought in to rape our women.
My fave is that if we complain about our nations being carved up into tribal sharia enclaves, WE’RE being devisive.
BWV 565 is my favorite organ work by far; such a work of genius. I have requested it to be played at my funeral.
What a wonderful commentary on the superiority of our Bible-based Western culture! Thank you so much for writing this, and for adding the Bach. I was going to pull out the score to read along but was too comfortable in my easy chair to get up and walk a couple of paces to the piano and get it…. And anyway, it was a lot more interesting to read your piece than to read more music, especially for a piece I am not currently working on.
This sounds to me like a recording by Virgil Thomson, organist extraordinaire (and many things besides, like composer, music critic, and…a man who lived to 92 years of age).
re. Creator: Genesis 1 works for me, with an expanded (astronomical-geologic) time scale. It has always (yes, since I was 6 years old) stunned me that the Days of Creation follow a *general* pattern later confirmed/somewhat altered by science. If that’s not divinely inspired writing, tell me what IS, thanks very much. 🙂
The 4th-century Christian church also formalized its understanding of the Creator, in what is now referred to as the Nicene Creed, as follows:
I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible.
(There’s a lot more, but THIS language opens the Creed and refers specifically to creation/the environment/cells/all of it.)
Thank you for a terrific essay and memory of Mr. Thomson (if indeed this is his playing).
I’ve always believed that the masses want to be led. They prefer to be told what to do, how to live, and to be treated as unfettered vassels and in return be given the basics of life. I’m amazed that “royal blood” is still acknowledged in the 21st Century; that certain people are elevated and worshipped simply because they were born into a blood line. It is this kind of false logic, especially among an illiterate population, that elevated Mohamet and others throughout history to positions of superiority. Fast forward to 2008, where Obama’s simplistic tactic of hope and change coupled with free stuff like phones (and, perhaps, his skin color), elevated him to the most powerful position in the world and an almost godlike stature.
If there is a brown pill it might be like this: The free will to live where one chooses with a caveat — adapt to the new life, do not bring the customs of the old life, and be happy with the new life that is chosen. Millions of Muslims in Western Europe refuse to let go of the old. And that’s the part that Angela Merkel didn’t consider.
Well I agree that this world did not get here by accident. With all due respect, though, a fugue is not a piece of music in which every other note is the same note.
Long ago I learned that piece by heart but the organ I had access to was not so grand. Now my hands are much older and stiffer and the old organ is somewhere else. But the notes are still in my head. Every one of them.
That red pill keeps me firmly grounded but I remain my own man with a profound distaste for green and brown ones.
Peace.
As you say, MC, the red pill was not perfect (though much better than the green one). However, if Ravioli (related to the Flying Spaghetti Monster?) exists and gave us freedom of choice and conscience, and some of us used our brains to conclude that said pasta is a figment of the imagination, wasn’t this equivalent to the development of a human from childhood to adulthood? Your God, in other words, has let go of our hands and pushed us out into the world. As Brian says (in Monty Python’s “Life of…”), “I’m not the Messiah, you have to work it out for yourselves”.
A world governed by the swallowers of the green pill might be a foretaste of Hell, but I don’t want to live in one where the red prevails, except as an example. Check out the ultra-orthodox zealots in your own country.
“and some of us used our brains to conclude that said pasta is a figment of the imagination, wasn’t this equivalent to the development of a human from childhood to adulthood”
If like junior grows up to find his parents didn’t exist… where would that leave junior?
“Your God, in other words, has let go of our hands and pushed us out into the world.”
This is the behavior of almost no living thing, except maybe bugs. Logical fallacy, methinks.
“the greatest of these being a failure to perceive the benefits of the red pill”. A generous claim, if we study the mind of Cain. There are blind people it’s true, yet blindness is not addressed in the commandments as far as I know. But then again…
Well, the alternative seems to be to compel people to live according to the prevailing religious orthodoxy, like a bunch of robots, which seems to be the aim of Islam- in which case why would God/Allah/Jahweh have created humans with minds of their own?
They are most harmless….
But not entirely, MC. In Stamford Hill, north London, the authorities have just closed down an unregistered Orthodox Jewish boys’ school, which had existed for 40 years, teaching only in Hebrew.
In your own country of Israel, there have been attempts to close down a microchip factory on the Sabbath, and harassment of a secular Jewess who travelled in the “wrong” part of a segregated bus.
Also in London and New York, rabbis accused of child sex abuse have been shielded by their own “parishioners”. All minor compared with Islamists, but hardly “harmless”.
That is a definition of fugue that I have never heard of. Actually, a fugue is characterized by a repeated motif, overlaid with the first presentation but offset by some number of measures. Not every other note has to be the same in order for a piece to be a fugue, and in fact, they usually are not.
Call it poetic license; the need to fit the subject ito the essay rather than the essay into the subject. Most readers are not musicologists.
“a fugue is a contrapuntal compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject (theme) that is introduced at the beginning in imitation (repetition at different pitches) and recurs frequently in the course of the composition.”