Spiegel im Spiegel

I have not listened to this music for some time. It is a piece of music I stumbled upon.

Leaving my mother after she passed away in a hospital, for some reason we stopped in downtown Vancouver. Maybe it was to walk among the living, looking for normalcy with my mother no longer part of it. For no particular reason I walked into a music store, which we used to call record stores until there were no more records.

Usually music stores are blaring music that drives me back to the street in seconds. Rap for which I have never grown a taste or new rock desperately in search of a tune with blaring chords shrieking from screaming guitars from Hell send me scurrying to the streets and the sanity of traffic sounds and sirens.

It is unusual to walk into a music store today (of those that are left; those that have not closed their doors thanks to iTunes and its highly compressed music few people notice) and hear something that is the antithesis to all I mentioned above. In it rare (to my taste) to walk into a music store and hear simple beauty.

I did not know the name of the song that was playing. I only know that having told my mother I loved her and she loved me and watch her die five minutes later was quite unsettling. I had flown from Budapest through Denver and on to Vancouver. I don’t think I was in the hospital for more than half an hour. When I said, “Hello, Mum, it’s Willy” (she called me that) her head shot around and she grabbed a desperate, pleading look into my eyes, tried to speak but could not, so I did. I whispered some close and personal words to her and she died.

It was one of those things you hear about but never think will happen to you.

If you do not know the song, I strongly recommend you listen to it. Lisa Batiashvili, a Georgian violinist who began playing at the age of four, performed the version I heard playing in that Vancouver music store .

Capturing the soul of music is what separates artists from performers. Capture it, she did. As in life, in music one can find beauty in sorrow, the pain of love and the paradox of letting things go but never letting them leave you. This music carves out a corner in your soul where you can safely store all things precious in life without fear of ever losing them. This music carves out a place where anyone in your life, dead or alive, can live with you. It’s a holy place, even for those of us who do not consider ourselves holy.