Turning I: A Bach Cantata

Spiral Shell, photograph by Edward Steichen

A Note after Listening to Cantata No. 104 by Johann Sebastian Bach

The initial choral passage of Bach’s cantata is drawn from the haunting 80th Psalm, which portrays a deeply troubled time for the people of Israel. The growing vine—the tree of life—which once bore so plentifully has been destroyed.  Once nourished in its shade and by its fruit, the people of Israel feel confused, fearful, betrayed. The haunting quality is found most poignantly in the psalmist’s refrain, repeated three times: “Turn us again, O God, and cause Thy face to shine…” The mid-passages of the cantata—the four recitatives and arias—are a facing and working through of the tensions between fear and trust, and faith is painfully and movingly reborn. Bach can then turn to those magnificent and familiar words of the 23rd Psalm: “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul…” The movement of the cantata—from the distressed, even anguished plea of the 80th Psalm to the peace and affirmation of the 23rd—is a dramatic turning.

The theme of turning or redemption is central to our Jewish-Christian tradition. The movement is that from life to death to rebirth, from one level of consciousness to a transition that is nothing short of death, thence to an experience of rebirth or renewal that is qualitatively other—larger, more capacious—than the life previously known. One unity of being and purpose is broken, undone; the soul, in effect, impounded. It cannot be redeemed, or even held beyond its time, without becoming some poor, hapless shadow of itself. We talk of the puer aeternus, of zombies, of the walking wounded, indeed, of the man in the gray flannel suit. Someplace in his reflections on the Gospels, Stephen Mitchell writes, “Only when we realize that we are lost can we begin to be found.”

The panic and shame of that awareness can be awful in its purgative clarity:

                        …The rending pain of re-enactment
                            Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
                            Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
                        Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
                            Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

                                                      - T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

There is imagery from Hasidic legend that vividly conveys a sense of the soul’s impoundment and of its release:

The spark in a stone or a plant or another creature is like a complete figure which sits in the middle of a thing as in a block, so that its hands and feet cannot stretch themselves and the head lies on  the knees. He who is able to lift the holy spark leads this figure into freedom, and no setting free of captives is greater than this.