Musical Miracles

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 I think I have mentioned here before that my older brother, Jim, died of a glioblastoma in 1984, when I was 37 years old. He was 41. Yeah, too young anyway you look at it. But I don’t want to dwell on the injustice of brain cancer, no point, no explanation. Instead I want to reflect on the miracles that music can work even in the dark hallways of a ravaged brain.  We were a musical family, probably as the result of my mother’s ability to play the piano, a bit by sight and certainly when helped along with the plethora of song books stashed in overflowing piano bench. Singalongs by the piano were an important part of growing up in our family. My Dad took a “summer teaching swap” with a colleague out on the west coast back in 1954 and 1956.  So we piled into our ‘54 Chevy Bel Aire and camped and sang our way from central Ohio to Southern California - three kids, two adults, round trips of several thousand miles, roadside table breakfasts and lunches - twice! It was great!

We all kept music in our lives while growing up. Choir, glee club, high school and college musicals. Brother Jim’s unique contribution was his ability to coax pretty much any tune you wanted out of his mysterious collection of harmonicas, shiny silver things with little plungers on the side that let you shift keys. He was a magician on those mouth organs.

One of the more insidious affects of glioblastoma is that it steals your speech, your ability to talk, to converse, to present your point of view. Talking was another cherished activity in our family. When I went to spend some time with Jim, and his jewel of a wife Linda, during what turned out to be the tail end of his illness, and his life, I was undone by his aphasia - until he and I discovered that he still could sing. And we sang it all. Show tunes, folk songs, little snatches of opera. But it soon became clear that we really hit our stride with early rock and roll - 1950s and 60’s. Buddy Holly, The Everly Brothers, Elvis, Nat King Cole, some Ray Charles, a sprinkling of Patsy Cline and just a touch of Hank Williams. Jim never missed a note or a lyric. But then when silence descended it was cruel and seemingly complete.

It wasn’t Don McLean’s dire “the day the music died.” I knew then that, as it is daily demonstrated in my somewhat obsessive attention to music,  the music never really dies. Rather it reaffirms the central role that music plays in the experiencing and expression of our lives. As Jim and I sang our way through our personal version of The Great American Songbook, faces and places flashed through my still healthy mind and, I fervently hoped, through his cruelly disordered one.  In the 37 years since Jim died, nothing has occurred to disabuse me of my firm belief of the centrality of music in life. When I settle in for the concert I construct each night to sing me to my dreams, I will sometimes select a specific genre, artist or era, the music of which I know will call up those faces, places, emotions and memories that I wish to accompany me down into gentle sleep.  It does not always work, but when it does it proves worth the effort.

Still, I often wonder where the music lives? And then I remember, I have answered this question before.  In my book The God Chord: Physics Meets the Landscape of the Heart, I assert the following:

I, however, am becoming increasingly convinced that string theory does lend significant predictive and explanatory insight into those seemingly "non-physics" concerns. If a tiny vibrating string is the fundamental unit, is the essential building block for everything in the universe, there are profound implications for the landscape of the human heart and mind and soul.  If string theory is right, then it isn't just tiny particles or huge interstellar regions that are made of strings - it is everything. It is you and I. We are composites of unimaginable billions of tiny vibrating strings. Vibrating strings make musical notes, groups of notes make chords, groups of chords make songs and melodies. We are made of music, we are literally walking, talking, thinking, sleeping and crying symphonies. (Moi, The God Chord, p. 10).

I need to pay closer attention to myself.  That is where the music goes - everywhere.  It may well be that certain functions are more comfortable in various spaces in our body - folks love to point to spots in the brain and say "This is where language skills reside. And over here is locomotion, strength, and our ability to sense our body location in space.  And then here we have . . . " But then we see people who have been in accidents or encountered disease that have laid waste to that part of the brain but, 'lo and behold, those various supposedly isolated functions find some overt flowering - somewhere, somehow.

Maybe it was singing with Jim that, in part, taught me that music was everywhere, 'tho I never got around to understanding it, and writing about it, until a quarter of a century later. The music remained there, inside him, and together we could still liberate it - if only for a little while. So, to paraphrase Jurassic Park, “Music finds a way.”

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