When you bring a guitar into tune, there is a sound beneath the sound that rises as each string begins to play its neighbor; as the combined harmonics of low and high notes begin to ring together and sustain each other; until the joined voices have filled the body of the instrument, and the whole is in vibration, in chorus.
If what fills me fills the guitar, then that harmony must be joy.
It is almost as if — beyond my small hopes and small despairs — that ringing drew all things near it into line with the past and with the future. And those harmonies that were unexpected and unexplained, that were greater than the single string that had been plucked, were evidence of a Spirit that is larger than me myself, larger than you yourself, but somehow the beauty that arises from our combination.
What I love about playing the guitar is that the guitar, in fact, plays me. On the face of it, the statement of a contrarian. The beauty that arises from combination is what calls out the movement of the fingers, the caress of the chord. When a chord is unexpected and larger than one’s thought, when it fills the body with harmonics that ring together and reach down into this emotion or that… when one chord leads to another, and the combinations increase… When an A Minor Sustained asks the heart for a little more feeling… then the accumulated sound overflows the breath, the larynx is tuned by the heart, and sometimes — if you are patient, and very very still — that vibrating creates a word, and another, until it all spills out unbidden in a song which was created by nothing less than everything outside of you.
Play the chord slowly, each string a distinct face. Play it quickly, and hammer your thumb against the frets. Draw off the fingers so that one emotion falls like water over stone into another… new emotion, old emotion. The next feeling is never unattached from the one which has just passed. Play with a pick and the voice is louder. Play with your fingers, and it is more delicate. Let it be, and the tears can flow up and shower the world with needed water. Let it go, and the laughter can bubble up and overwhelm the losses, as a spring flower always will overwhelm the memory of winter.
This past week I remembered a few songs that had caught me by the heart. It is good instruction to learn to play those tunes. It honors their authors, whose bodies had been borrowed by the muse. It honors the music, that sits in collected memory, waiting for another voice to play it. And it honors and exercises the heart, that carries so much sentiment in its fibers, often without recognition.
The first that came to mind — how did it come to mind? did someone sing it? did it show up on a radio? — was Bobby McGee, written by Kris Kristofferson, covered by his then-lover Janis Joplin, covered by others. “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose // nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free…”. Somehow welcomed again by my guitar. The chords are simple. And as I played it, allowing the lyric to knock around my heart, I heard the sense of the song, and heard it ask for accompaniment, right there, by a harmonica… ahh, I have one…! “Through all kinds of weather, through everything we done // and every night she kept me from the cold…”
The second came like one string harmonizing with the first. “Then trouble’s gonna lose me, worry leave me behind // And I’ll rise up smiling, with true peace of mind…” Carole King, from her exquisite album Tapestry. “Way over yonder there’s a place that I know // where I will find shelter from hunger and cold…”
All from a set of strings, and a humming that begins in the heart.
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