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I was interning then, so I was probably about twenty-five or twenty-six,
and I attended a concert of the fourteenth string quartet of Beethoven.
The Julliard quartet was giving a series of Beethoven quartets
and that particular evening they were doing the fourteenth.
When we speak of Beethoven's last quartets we speak of numbers twelve through sixteen.
But the core of those last quartets are the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth,
which actually were not written in that order. They were really written,
the fifteenth was first, then the thirteenth and then the fourteenth,
but they were published in the order of thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth.
But those three quartets formed a unit and they really represent
the end of the journey and they were unlike any music anybody I think has ever composed.
The fourteenth quartet, C sharp minor, is the acme of all that
as preceded by the fifteenth and the thirteenth.
And it begins with a slow movement which is a fugue, which probably
I would say comes as close as any artist has ever come in rendering
what the Peace of Heaven is like. There is a peace in that music
that is beyond anything in this world.
When St. Paul talked about the peace that passes understanding,
that's the peace that Beethoven captured in that opening movement.
The quartet itself is exceptional and unusual in its form.
It's seven movements but they are not discrete movements they just kind of flow,
ebb and flow to different tempi, different moods but they are like all of one piece.
But that opening fugue, that adagio, is unlike anything else.
And this evening while I was listening to it I felt for the first time
I was beginning to really hear what was there.
And I remember it was a very dramatic experience for me.
I felt that there were no barriers. There's a section in the Course, "Beyond the Body",
which we may look at later on, where Jesus talks about that everyone knows
and has at some point had the experience when they join with something
beyond themselves and become one with it.
I remember when I read that section for the first time what I thought of
immediately was that experience of Beethoven.
Anyway, the following morning I had a therapy patient early at the hospital
that I was interning at and I remember driving to work, it was about a thirty minute drive,
and I remember very specifically saying to myself, I want to have that experience
that I had the previous night carry over, and I did not know how to do that.
I wanted to have whatever it is I was doing with this patient, who was a woman I think,
I wanted the mood in the room to somehow be an extension of what I had felt the previous night.
And that was the first time I had ever felt that as a goal.
And it was important for me because it was one of the early steps that I was taking
to bring together these two tracks that my life had been divided into.
The external, which was becoming a psychologist specifically a psychotherapist,
and the internal, which was music and what I guess I used to refer to as the Beethoven experience.
And this was the first time I felt there was at least a possibility;
I understood the importance of bringing these two together.
I think I came away from the session feeling like an abysmal failure
because I knew I did not do that. Whatever it was that went on in the session
I knew was miles away from what I had experienced the previous evening.
But I at least now knew what the idea was and that became very, very important to me.
The second experience had to do with Franz Schubert.
I might mention by the way that these three experiences that I'm talking about
I never related together until thinking about this workshop.
When I began to think back to those experiences and I suddenly realized
that they really all formed like one piece.
The Schubert experience was a little different in that the focus was no longer on me
but I felt the focus was more on Schubert.
Just to give you a little background on Schubert, he died one year after Beethoven.
Beethoven died in 1827; Schubert died in 1828, but he lived almost half the life.
He died at thirty-one, Beethoven died at fifty-seven. His was a particular tragic life.
He was not very, very happy. He was depressed, but he was a great, great composer.
And, he worshiped Beethoven.
The last year of his life he wrote some of his greatest work including two trios,
trio being that it was written for violin, piano and cello.
And this is the trio in B-flat and E-flat, number one and number two. He only wrote two of them.
This particular evening I was going to listen to the second of these two trios, in E-flat.
Up until that point my experience of Schubert had been, as it still is,
that when you listen to him especially his mature music, there is a profound sadness
that you feel in his music. It's very deep. It's not that it's just sad music.
It's not that it's in a minor key and it feels sad, it's that there's a profound sadness
that permeates his work, which I think mirrored the sadness in his life.
And when I heard this performance that evening I suddenly understood
where the sadness was coming from. It was always there.
It was just something that was kind of a given, but when I listened to this trio
which is one of his greatest works, I'm not sure when it happened,
I suspect it was probably in the second movement, I suddenly could hear
a part of Schubert saying I'm not going to go there.
It was like the place where Beethoven went, Schubert was saying I'm just not going to go there.
I can't go there. I won't go there. I'm not able to go there, whatever it was,
but you could almost hear it in the music at least I heard it.
And I came away from that really understanding that if you listen very carefully
you will hear the soul whether it's a composer, whether it would be a poet,
whether it would be a psychotherapy patient, whether it would be anybody,
that if you really listen you could hear. I'm not sure what I did with that.
Again, a lot of what I'm saying now is more retrospectively looking at this.
And I certainly did not connect it up with the Beethoven experience
as I am going to do now. But it was very clear that in listening to Schubert
you could hear the block. You could hear the place where he was saying I won't go there.
It didn't stop the trio from being a magnificent creative work,
a magnificent experience to listen to, but again I think part of the reason
that he worshipped Beethoven so was that he recognized Beethoven went to a place he could not go.
It is interesting by the way that they are buried side by side.
I was reading at that time, when I was still in graduate school,
I was reading some of the work of R. D. Laing. I don't know if any of you are familiar with him,
L A I N G. In the sixties especially he was like the prophet of schizophrenia.
His books were very, very popular especially among us graduate students
because we were all fed up with the psychiatric establishment,
how patients were treated. They were over-medicated. They were locked away.
They were given electric shock treatment without anybody knowing why
they were given electric shock treatment. And Laing spoke for the experience of psychosis
and he wrote very, very poetically. He did not write so much as a scientist
as much as somebody who really felt it. And I discovered afterwards he himself had
a number of psychotic breaks so he was really speaking from his own experience.
And the point of his work was that a schizophrenic, the part of the psychotic break,
was a journey and they had to leave the world and go into their inner space.
And the task of the therapist was to help that patient get through, get to the other side.
And in his work this one particular book called, "The Politics of Experience",
he described working with one man who had a psychotic break
and how he was working with him in a hospital and in a sense it
was part of an inner journey. And in the book he described how the man
described how, as he was going through this and could begin to see the light,
after going through this tunnel of darkness and tremendous terror,
that he was still aware there was a place he was not going to go.
And when he got through and he basically recovered and resumed living
a relatively normal life there was yet a place that he articulated, he said I'm not going there.
And when I read that I recognized that's the same place that I had felt in Schubert
and I could begin to feel in other people. I was able to feel it in myself
when I would hear Beethoven's music and aware that there was still more to do.
There was still a place, there was still a part of the journey to go.