There is an overpass bridge in one of the busiest parts of Manila which leads on the one side to a bureaucratic government agency which taxes its citizens who visit from abroad and on the other side to a huge shopping mall. Many years ago I happened to visit my native land which meant going to the government building to pay my absurd dues; after the usual long hours of waiting in line, signing unnecessary papers, and of witnessing the deliberate laziness of some government employees I was hungry and it was lunch time. I only had to cross the overpass bridge to get to the mall where a wide array of restaurants and food stalls gave a sense of relief from the bleak Kafkaesque mood of its opposite building.
The narrow bridge gave a drab view of the dizzyingly dense traffic in both the South and North roads; above me were the grey tall office buildings and condominium units while below the long succession of weather-beaten faces in sidewalks that gave a melancholy dignity to the gloomy vibes of the industrial city. Crossing the bridge I was immediately squeezed tight between thick streams of people passing to and fro alongside street vendors and beggars alike who depend on this bridge for a living.
At the end of the other side of the bridge a blind guitarist was playing. The volume of his electric guitar competed against the staggering noises of the city. A tin can, which was barely full, stood beside the handy amplifier. I took the few coins I kept from my pocket trousers and inserted them into the tin can. I stood on a corner, listening apprehensively, trying to focus my attention as much as I could to the blind guitarist who sat like a gatekeeper to the other world. He was playing and singing at the same time. I believe he was performing his own song, although I don’t remember exactly the words, the song was intrinsically religious.
What stuck in my memory though was the image of his hands which embodied a certain rhythm—a rhythm of pain. Not merely the pain which comes from the fact of blindness; notwithstanding the absence of sight his hands saw and felt the world around him. A harsh world. His hands seemed rough like the hands of a mechanic or a peasant; hands that were familiar with sweat and toil with long and bony fingers. Like any learned musician his hands were technically capable and agile which made it even more astounding because he was blind! During chord changes his left hand fingers positioned themselves with precise reckoning, and the right hand that held the plectrum was equally agile. The blind guitarist’s tactile relationship with his instrument was guided by an unusual instinctive musicality. The quality of his technique seemed to be a consequence of a kind of discipline—the discipline of faith. Obviously, music was his way of making a living. What is not obvious is music, too, was his response to the injustices of life.
The pain the blind guitarist carried in his hands was something close to the origin of the blues. It came from the depths, from the darkness which he saw when he was not playing. The brilliant American theologian James Cone: the blues experience is “an encounter with life, its trials and tribulations, its bruises and abuses—but not without benefit of the melody and rhythm of the song.” Music somehow bears on the listener a tragic sense of life. Tragedy not as the finality of our helplessness but as a constant companion. Music does not protect us from the ever imminent tragedies of life rather it envelops us into their imminence so as to bear them.
Yet despite the everyday cruelties the rhythm of pain was far from despair. Maybe because when the blind guitarist played a certain light settled on his sight. A light which coexists with pain—this light that comes from the act of music. Yes, I say act, because the experience of music can sometimes be very visceral.
From the chaotic narrow bridge enter the other doorway of memory to the quiet, dark auditorium where the Greek classical guitarist Antigoni Goni is playing. As contrasting as the two places are so are the two musicians. The blind man and Antigoni have nothing musically in common except for their own unique gifts as musicians. What they share perhaps is the two different voices of the singular pain which they both carry in their playing.
Of the several pieces Antigoni is playing tonight, one articulates the nature of the light which I want to talk to you about. First let me tell you how she plays. Antigoni plays the guitar as though she were a navigator. Partly because as a concert musician she travels frequently. But beyond land and sea and air her navigation involves the geography of memory. The expression of her face when she plays is exactly like one reading a map. And just as her name suggests a form of resistance, her playing resists sentimentality. Maybe because she is a Greek. Or simply, as an experienced musician, she is attuned to the necessity of love, memory, and technique with equal weight. Like all great navigators she likes to take risks.
Antigoni is playing Suite del Recuerdo by the Argentinian guitarist-composer Jose Luis Merlin. A piece in honor of what was lost and never found; a separation so complete that hope is accompanied not by optimism but by grief. The first movement of the piece (Evocacion) opens with a haunting melody of loss. The loss of those left behind like the mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires whose sons and daughters were made disappear during the days of the military junta in Argentina. Antigoni, with vibrant decisiveness, instills in the piece the tenderness of motherly persistence. The pursuit of justice is unthinkable without memory. At the back of the sheet music, Jose Luis Merlin explains the significance of his piece: “This is an homage to memories, my memories. To the collective memories of my people living in nostalgia, tormented, anguished, happy and hopeful… It is like looking inside yourself in very profound silence.” When music is played and heard something in us arises, meets, something corroborates and colludes, as though the musician and the listener are in for a conspiracy.
What time, ruthlessness, and defeat have taken away, music keeps. Music is in a way an act of holding on. Something is brought back to life when a piece of music moves us. We re-encounter the groove, the dead, and the missed left behind and get to keep them like our ten fingers. “Time to meet the most beautiful ones / those who prevailed with their great defeat,” wrote the Argentine poet Juan Gelman.
The Suite ends in the festive rhythm Joropo; the most affirming movement in the piece as though its exhilaration is itself a mockery of the powers that be—the perpetrators of erasure and distorters of memory. This last movement is not simply celebratory or triumphant for the losses are irrevocable and the pursuit of justice assures no promise but informs us that the time for grief is also the time for love, that loss can find its way to remembrance. And what is taken into memory, into heart, into music no power, no cruelty, no bastard can snatch it away; nor does it diminish in time rather it broadens into an improbable hope.
What this improbable hope is—is the impossible light the blind guitarist saw when he played.
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