Daily Bach not Blog

It's become obvious that I will be the only one reading this Blog and that's okay. Somehow its public nature still exerts a kind of gentle pressure on me , a weak force, like let's say gravity. I have only missed one day of practice and this is a new and revelatory experience for me. Something about making a large commitment in such a public way, regardless of whether anyone ever responds to me has spurred me on. Now it's starting to become just a part of my day. There are going to be pieces I do not succeed with in one week of playing, there is just too much that is difficult, subtle, confounding and confusing in these little gems. But I do my best to revisit all the pieces as I go on, and as time moves forward I will pick and choose the ones that need the most work. The mountain of material to wrangle with becomes ever larger.
I will say this, Bach knew how to write beautiful lines of music and he also was not afraid of the harshest of harmonies. If one takes apart small pieces of any given fugue for example, one can zero in on clashes of minor seconds and major sevenths, of tritones tripping by, resolving quickly so that one hardly has time to perceive the "ouch" of those intervals. They are like the problems of a day, harsh in a moment and yet resolved into harmony and some kind of clarity.
I've also been sensing in my being a yearning to play these pieces faithfully and truthfully, for when they are played as Bach intended there is a truth in them that extends beyond any truth that language may provide us. I have lately felt that language at times serves us not for good but for ill; it forces people into rigid ideological positions which invariably can be proven false or inadequate; it fosters a mockery of the intelligence of both the sage and the crowd, but especially the crowd which falls back on mythological thinking, foolish cliche driven rhetoric, the mob becomes inflamed with righteous anger and then becomes dangerous. We are in such a moment in our history, we have an inflamed, illiterate and fear whipped mob intent on bringing down democracy, misunderstanding what a free society is.
Oh boy, what am I doing here? This is my music page, not my political rant page. You see, though, music moves us past the horrors of the day, it speaks to us only with truth. The sound imparts a knowledge and beauty which is actually not speakable in linguistic symbology. But it is knowable in the body and the soul. As far as I'm concerned music is as close to knowing God as one can get.