Bach’s Chaconne, the fifth and final movement from his Partita in D Minor, is probably the most important piece of music in my life.

I remember 2014, all that year listening to it in the quiet of night, night after night. It was a period of strange grief. My teacher Ken, an enigmatic, joyful and genuinely holy person, had recently died, and I lived in a somewhat dissociated state. While on the one hand I was functioning well as a budding clinician, PhD student, and husband to my beautiful, pregnant wife, on another level there was an aspect of my experience that my conscious mind was totally out of touch with. But it was there. Yet even this, unconscious as it was, was a conflicted experience. It was hard to conceptualize my grief about Ken precisely because of the lessons he taught me and which I was learning to integrate into my life to greater degrees – namely, that the separation is an illusion, in this case meaning that ultimately though Ken’s form was obviously gone, the Love he represented could not and would not cease to exist. The central axiom is that if there is no separation nothing could be lost, ever. A message like this, however, takes time to digest as our identification as egos, seemingly separate beings, asserts just the opposite. What do we do, then, with the experience of loss? Especially when the loss occurs with someone whose primary purpose was to teach that though appearances change, what’s true can never die? This is a complicated issue to resolve, and I think I simply put it away.

Thus my approach to Bach’s Chaconne – a piece Ken loved and which I associated with him – was an endeavor rife with meaning. Sitting with it meant sitting with him and through the genius of the music raising to experience, little by little, all that remained unprocessed in the deeper regions of my mind.

Over the course of that year, I let the music take over me, teaching and healing me through its spiral staircase of heavenly harmonic formation, touching on deep pain and deep grief, somehow gathering it all in a profound movement of musical grace. And I cried every time. Deep sorrow expelled. I thought I was crying for Ken. Indeed I was. But I realized that the tears were also something else – crying the tears of my heart, the tears that had always wished to be cried – body, soul and bones cleansed bit by bit as I listened.

This music is in a sense like a psychedelic trip in that it takes you on a journey. But the intimacy requires no chemical intermediary, no alteration in consciousness save for the organic one that emerges as the willing heart opens in raw fullness and the music purifies. I am not unique in asserting the power of the Chaconne[1]. Johannes Brahms, another favorite composer of mine, is fabled to have remarked:

“The Chaconne is for me one of the most wonderful, incomprehensible pieces of music. On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and the most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”

As the variations on the theme in the Chaconne developed, expanded then returned and expanded again and again in ever deepening patterns of elegant complexity, so did the shades of my grief move. My feeling states reached new depths, I cried more deeply, my body and heart convulsed, letting go of what felt to be ancient scars buried just beneath my normal awareness, pain that no doubt motivated and shaped my conscious mind.

The music is like a roadmap. If willing, it catapults the listener into domains of inner terrain that one could scarce believe possible. Such it was for me. There was often an exhausted heaving in me at the music’s end – I was spent – but that does not imply that the process was harsh or abusive. It wasn’t. What it was, was real. I surmise that in the company of Bach’s genius via the Chaconne, as is the case with great art of all types, there is an absolution that takes the soul on fire to release. And while the catharsis is profound and perhaps taxing, the experience is felt to be vital rather than traumatizing. Taking one to the edge of pain and stepping just beyond it to the land of grace and love – that’s what this music does. It became, paradoxically, a way of getting more in touch with myself while also feeling myself totally wedded to the love beyond form that for me Ken represented.  

In retrospect it seems that the only way I could meaningfully approach and deal with Ken’s death was to bring it to life through art, that is, situating whatever I felt against the backdrop of a piece of music that could do justice to what he, and more importantly what he taught, represented. In this, through the compassionate genius of the Chaconne, what I might have described as grief was transmuted in the truest sense. There was no denial, no placating, no minimizing or spiritualizing feelings – a common and destructive error for people on the spiritual path. The feelings, all of them, were there in their intensity and depth, as is right and good. Yet what Bach does is provide a meaningful blueprint through grief by the ability to articulate it so clearly and beautifully – no fear, no resistance, expressing it and feeling it all through the musical form. The amazing part of this is that in the absence of resistance or repression there is the capacity for full expression, and that full expression, seems to me, is carried by another Force. Call it Nature, or God, or Spirit, what have you, but indeed it is a transpersonal, impersonal Force. And that’s what we feel, that’s what’s so healing. It holds, contains, and transforms what is very human – grief, pain and loss – to something that feels more akin to divine. We are taken, moved, and changed. This is the beauty of art; this is the beauty of healing.

---

[1] https://onbeing.org/blog/the-story-behind-bachs-monumental-chaconne/

Image courtesy of Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partita_for_Violin_No._2_%28Bach%29#/media/File:Chaconne-Manuscript.png