What do an act of forgiveness (an “act,” how frozen already in the isolating tagging of our languages, how calculating, how habit-creating and secure) and the second partita of Bach have in common? Does the uniqueness of each reverberate in a similar fashion through consciousness? One can’t write another ciaconna (but adapt it, as for piano, the piece Hélène Grimaud played this week at the Carnegie) or repeat the act of forgiveness, without destroying (attempting to destroy) the original, but one can play it forever, everyday, with an ever renewed pleasure, and act from within the shelter, aura, reverberating spirit of a once created forgiving. There is no limit to the replaying of a once created vision. Another question lurks in the background: does the partita move me because I’ve heard a kind of music and singing that prepares me to recognize the arrangement of chords as a new dramatic creation? and the forgiving by another I also recognize as a dramatic re-creation of an all-too defined world, a known, or thought known, world of relationships and social structures.
But how does this play in another culture, say India? another music, another forgiveness?