THE ART OF FUGUE
They meet in Burlington, Iowa. My rail-thin mother with curly hair and her little girl beside her, my tall bony father with his bachelor aviator glasses and slick black hair. Their love is at first, like many others, obsessive. They spend drunken nights together and laugh about them the next morning. They are young, they take risks. They make commitments, and together in this storm of a life they create they decide to buy an aquamarine house with twin gables in the Rocky Mountains.
A fugue, musically, though arguably in other aspects as well, is a technique of writing. It is not a strict form, but more of a process of development. A discussion of an idea, by a definite number of voices, in imitation. Though there are rules to writing in Fugue, restriction often encourages creativity to flourish: in writing, in art, in music.
The Art of Fugue is an unfinished musical work written by Johann Sebastian Bach during the last decade of his life, as a culmination of his experimentation with the Fugue. The collection is written in D minor, said by Ernst Pauer to, “express a subdued feeling of melancholy, grief, and solemnity.” A fugue begins with an exposition, in which the material is exposed, a subject or melodic idea beginning with a single voice. After the exposition there are no strict rules for overall structure.
Late one night their car rolls down the side of a steep hill just two minutes from their home, both of them drunk. They stumble out, mainly intact, survivors. He calls a friend of a friend who tows the car, and they keep the accident a secret for most of our lives. They promise each other for the sake of their daughter and newborn son to get sober together. They rebuild themselves and their relationship with each other and with substance.
Together, under highland sunrises and sunsets.
Musically, a fugue is written in counterpoint. In the words of John Rahn, “It is hard to write a beautiful song. It is harder to write several individually beautiful songs that, when sung simultaneously, sound as a more beautiful polyphonic whole. The internal structures that create each of the voices separately must contribute to the emergent structure of the polyphony, which in turn must reinforce and comment on the structures of the individual voices. The way that is accomplished in detail is counterpoint.”
My father becomes a master electrician for Burlington Northern. Forest green trains with white BN logos carry cargo in and out of Denver while he works to maintain the trains and tracks. We plant pansies and marigolds in the flower beds on the hill in front of our house, and my mother brings us iced Pepsi and tells us that we are strong and handsome. Years pass, in that happy childhood way when there is no reason to mark the time specifically because each morning brings wild green grasshoppers, ruby throated hummingbirds, amethyst mountains for miles. Each evening colorful cartoon movies, bubble baths, and tomato soup all cozy and tucked away in the hills.
When I am still very young, my mother suffers a wrist injury. It happens while she is working at a bank, a motion she repeats time after time, only this time, ligaments or muscles or a strange angle of bone pinches her nerve, permanently damaging it forever. Her pain receptors no longer communicate correctly with her body. She feels pain even when there is none. From this moment on she spends the rest of her life in and out of doctors’ offices, wears an ice pack around her arm every summer day, attaches adhesive electrodes to her back to receive small electrical shocks which are supposed to help dull the pain but do not, and later argues over and over again about whether she should be allowed to continue using her high dosage of morphine.
The fugue has another definition, a meaning unrelated to music or writing. A fugue may be described as, “a dreamlike state of altered consciousness that may last for hours or days.” Or worse, “a dissociative disorder in which a person forgets who they are and leaves home to create a new life; during the fugue there is no memory of the former life; after recovering there is no memory for events during the dissociative state.” I try to trace the word back to find which meaning came first, but all I can find is the origin, the Latin word fuga, which means flight. I try to trace our family back to find which fracture caused the irreparable damage, the eventual collapse, but all I can do is recount the events, the injuries, the arguments.
Their marriage changes. Weekend nights they used to spend staying up late playing Doctor Mario on the Nintendo, laughing, threatening, and roughhousing come to an end. Apologies flow constantly from my mother, she’d planned to clean the house and get more laundry done, messy magazines on coffee tables and sinks full of dishes—she wants to do everything she used to but can’t. She feels inadequate; he feels pity for her.
She hates pity. What she needs is something only she can give to herself.
After the first musical voice is established a second voice answers the subject. A reproduction of the subject transposed to the dominant. In counterpoint you can have a canon at the union, but it’s not always that way.
One day my little sister is born.
Burlington Northern merges with the Santa Fe railroad and the trains change to bright orange cars with black BNSF lettering. The merger offers opportunity, and with my newborn sister, we move to a new home far from the Centennial State, a boring beige barn looking structure in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
My father’s hands are rough and calloused, stained black from the late nights he is now often on call for. The house phone rings at two a.m. and though the rest of us fall back into a warm slumber, he pulls himself out of bed, makes coffee, bundles up in layers. He drives miles in the cold dark to repair track heaters and turntables, battles against the freezing Minnesota winters so they don’t ice the rails. He climbs poles to fix overhead lights, hands clutching greasy wrenches and applying the proper amount of torque—always taking layers of skin from his fingers and palms so that over time they become thick and strong, hard enough to block out the pain of windchill on his skin but not hard enough to block the emotions that chill his muscles, chill his bones.
My mother’s hands are not fragile, as this juxtaposition might suppose. The contrary, her hands, too, are strong from use, nights working at the convenience store handling cash and stocking shelves, arms grown muscular from holding up the pole to change the signs for the price of gas, carrying boxes of paper good to and from the back room. Stained with grease and nicotine, a carton a week for years, like my father’s.
When I am eleven, we visit my grandparents in Grand Forks, North Dakota. We try to hide our disharmony, but my parents break into an argument. Probably about money, though maybe about resentment, disappointment. My grandmother makes my mother and father stay outside in their car to talk until they work things out. Our family is Catholic, divorce an unforgivable sin. A sin, too, for a child to be raised without both parents when it can be helped. Vows are not made to be broken. They try again. Try to begin again, as though beginning again might be possible.
I think now: What does a family know of happiness apart, as long as they stay together?
In a fugue, stretto is the imitation of the subject in close succession, so that the answer enters before the subject is completed. In Italian it means narrow or tight. It’s typically employed near the end of a fugue, where the “piling-up” of two or more temporally off-set statements of the subject signals the arrival of the fugue’s consolation in climactic fashion.
My parents do not have friends in Minnesota like they did in Colorado. They spend more time at work, and less time together. They take turns spending the evenings with us while the other is at their job. My sister and I get our own keys to the house, we often make microwave dinners together. We interact as a family but spend most of our time in separate rooms of the house. There are whispers that float up from the veneer dining table downstairs after we are in bed, solemn discussions of topics we aren’t meant to hear, but do. Some nights they escalate, and there is a hardness to their voices that I haven’t heard before.
The hardness causes my muscles to tense. I flinch. Shiver.
Double fugue: A fugue which exposes two distinct subjects. Imitation, the same material repeated starting on a different note.
Counter fugue: in which the subject is used simultaneously in regular, inverted, augmented, and diminished forms.
On a hot afternoon in June, my father is on a ladder propped up against my grandparent’s shed repairing shingles. I am supposed to be out holding the ladder helping him like I used to when we’d plant flowers or work on the house together, but he has little patience with me anymore and I’ve grown stubborn, so instead I’m inside watching TV. A split second—he stretches further than he should, feels the ladder come out of balance—a tip—and he falls. He crashes to the ground from less than eight feet above, but luck has failed. He lands on his elbow, a sharp splintered humerus seconds ago safe in his strong arm now protruding out of the skin. He cannot imagine how much he will tire from the skin grafts and surgeries that will never fully fix what he has broken. Shock and pain next, a frightened scream makes it to me inside the house and after a minute I recognize his voice. I panic. When I run out to see him: a rag doll thrown from a treehouse, bones in unnatural positions. I blink. I’m running. Hands trembling, I nearly drop the phone dialing 911. I don’t know the address. I ask my grandfather, but Alzheimer’s has taken the address of his home of forty years. I blink, my grandmother takes over. I run out the front door, leaving my father in the back, on the ground.
Face in palms soaked with tears, gasping for air, alone.
The medical bills are enough to cripple anyone without insurance. Thankfully, the now-orange-boxcars union provides us assistance, but still we struggle. The arguments aren’t cloaked in whispers anymore. They aren’t relegated to cars outside my grandparent’s house. They are open and volatile and occasionally my sister or I get caught in them unaware. My sister and I imitate their voices, we rage against each other and shift alliances between our parents, between each other, depending on the day. I stay with some cousins for a week and she stays with a friend’s family. The words separation and divorce fall out of my mouth in the school counselor’s office along with “my fault.”
Things missed: family dinners: our father’s homemade pizza, our mother’s goulash, homemade cinnamon rolls and loaves of bread, games: Sorry! Candyland, Uno, favorite shows: Stargate, The Waltons, MadTV.
When my sister and I come back to stay at home we often find our mother crying. Her rage turns to tears and then one day there are not even tears. Maybe my father cries too. All feeling seems to fade. There are no grins or grimaces, just measure after measure composed of rests. Silence. The years grey together as my sister and I enter adolescence and one day in high school after I have come out as gay my father asks to talk to me. As I’m seated on the couch in the living room he walks over, stumbling, and shaky as he sits down next to me. He acts strange, or he smells strange, I’m uncertain. He asks me why I don’t find women attractive, why I don’t want kids, if I am really making a choice.
Later, upset and confused, I ask my mother. She tells me he’s been drinking, and for a moment I think drinking what? I have never seen either of my parents drunk until this moment. I think disappointedly, they have broken their promises to each-other. There is no more counterpoint, no harmony, no reason to continue. Still, for a few more months, they remain together.
The Unfinished Fugue breaks off abruptly in the middle of its third section, with an only partially written measure 239. This autograph carries a note in the handwriting of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach stating, “At the point where the composer introduces the name BACH [for which the English notation would be B♭–A–C–B♮] in the countersubject to this fugue, the composer died.”
I graduate high school and move back to the Centennial State. I look for the happiness we left behind in a new city with new friends and a new college, and while I search, they separate. My mother and sister move into their own apartment and my father, now alone, holes himself up in that old curdled-cream house and drinks until one day he stops again. At AA meetings he meets a woman with the same name as my mother. At work my mother meets a man.
They both remarry.
My dad lives with the pain in his arm (and the fact that he will never raise it past his shoulder ever again) and my mother lives with the pain that manifests in her wrist.
And all these years later I find I still live with the pain whenever I call to mind the family we used to be. I try to put my thoughts anywhere near in order enough to puzzle together what was and what now is—if they made a mistake bringing me into the world and what I could have done to keep them together. I know what I can do now, so I write it down. Even if it doesn’t really change anything.
I wonder about endings. About beginnings. About knowing or not knowing the past. About the conversations I’ve had with the people in this story and how no two versions are the same.
About how some hold on to resentment, while others don’t hold on at all. The blame and fault keep repeating. The voices of unforgivable words and answers of broken promises. The silence that sometimes comes unexpectedly.
Did Bach leave the fugue unfinished on purpose? Some have suggested that he left it as a form of musical puzzle—an invitation to other composers to either guess his intentions or come up with their own solutions. In the end, perhaps we’re all left guessing at intentions.
I know only this truth for certain: At one time my mother and father were happy together. Not just happy, but as in love as I’ve ever seen two people in my whole life.
And then one day they just weren’t. Weren’t happy. Weren’t in love. Weren’t even sad anymore.
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Christopher’s work has appeared in a variety of literary journals including Entropy and Sidereal. He lives with his husband Tim in Colorado where he cooks and plays the piano. More at www.ceckman.com
