Lying in Bed Read Online Free PDF

passing from two-part to the increased difficulty of three, the Sinfonias, though never does he leap so far that he stops cradling the delicate sensibilities of his firstborn … I picture him bending this strange maiden over the bench of his Gottfried Silbermann or Arp Schnitger and lifting her skirts with one hand while with the other he bangs out something he’d learned on his recent pilgrimage to Buxtehude in Lübeck. * The strange maiden herself releases him from his britches and says, “That’s quite some organ,” and Bach responds, “Yes, it’s a Silbermann,” or, “Yes, it’s a Schnitger,” and they both enjoy the joke, and prolong it, as the strange maiden says, “Enter here, Silbermann,” or,“You must have received a nasty blow, Schnitger, for you are all swollen,” and Bach responds to the strange maiden, “It is time for you to sing, with the accompaniment of my organ,” and as her fingers play along the length of him and grasp the thickness of him and finally force him headfirst through her silent, open lips, she begins to sing the only song that pullulating man never did set down.
    Strange maiden. Since I first read of Bach’s encounter with her in the organ loft in Arnstadt, I have become obsessed with her. She has become not simply whoever that adventuresome girl might have been back in 1706 and who is now dust’s dust in some grave surely as unmarked as Bach’s first, but every girl, any girl, who might lift her skirts and laugh and guide a strange lad into herself and then step off the page of history into oblivion.
    It is marriage itself, and Clara as its embodiment, that has made a philogynist of me. When I walk with her in the street—for I am almost never out unless I’m out with her—I am assaulted by the beauty of the strange maidens I see at every turn. They seem etched into the very air even as they part it with the long blades of their legs. But then the air surrounds them, and they are gone, she is gone. Goodbye, I cry silently to her, goodbye into your life. She never hears me, and if she sees me, it is only inadvertently. I am part of the landscape of the city, another man in a tie bleak against the sky. I do reach for them, these women, but only with my eyes. It is not that they are necessarily unattainable, for who knows? Any one of them might yield, if spoken to, illaqueated in the lepid net of language. But then she would be a stranger no longer, and I would no longer long for her. A strange maiden’s desirability resides precisely in her remaining indeterminate and unexplored.
    A wife is as far from being a strange maiden as awoman can be. A wife is known, from the permutable textures of her hair right down to the camber of her toes.
    I am as rare in my mammalian monogamy as the klipspringer, the siamang, the reedbuck, and the incongruously named dik-dik. I want no other woman than my wife. The others, the strangers, who vanish like death, only break my heart. My wife holds it together.
    Those who came after Bach and sought to sanctify him, as they believed he sanctified the evil in the world with his masses and motets, proclaimed that the strange maiden whom he lofted by the organ in Arnstadt was his cousin Maria Barbara, soon to be his wife.
    They sought to excuse his sins by uxoriating them. How little they knew of marriage, which withers without the exaltation of sin.
    Bach’s wife died when he was away from Cöthen, where they lived while he accomplished such little things as the Brandenburg Concertos and—how cruelly ironic—the Wedding Cantata , in whose opening adagio the oboe impregnates the soprano.
    When he arrived home from his travels, he was told that Maria Barbara had died and been buried.
    No goodbyes. No final embrace. No vision to carry forever of his wife vulnerable and inviting on her back with her hands on her breasts and her legs demurely open beneath her