Baffled Joy

I have long known who Mischa Elman was: one of the great violinists of the last century (1891–1967). But only last month did I finally manage to listen to him. He is dead, of course. But there are available recordings of his playing that date back to the 1920s. These are a bit scratchy, though his legendary honeyed tone and impeccable and elegant technique still come through. Later recordings are magnificent. His playing is transcendent.

Or so it seems to me. But what am I actually listening to? These are but sounds, mechanically transferred to discs and now to digital platforms on the internet. Is it Elman? Or an aural simulacrum, now drifting across the years and miles, alighting on the earphones of yet another captive to commerce’s net of fabricated treasures? 

Our experience of time is complex. Pasts, presents, futures, immediacies and indirections, memories and hopes: this is the stuff of philosophical reflection from the earliest Greek thinkers to contemporary metaphysicians and logicians, who swim about with the physics of relativity and quantum mechanics. 

A lot hangs on our understandings of what time “is.” What happens when we listen to old recordings of music, or read an eighteenth-century novel, hear an ancient poem, or look at a black and white photo of a now-lost Rembrandt painting in an old art book we picked up at the used book store? 

I’ve long pondered the value of old recordings, printed records, and copied images. The twentieth-century social critic Walter Benjamin argued in a famous essay that “mechanical reproduction” (printing, engraving, photography, recording, cinema, and now digital replication) stripped art of its “aura,” its profound meaning. Decoupled from personal encounter, unique materiality and location, communal use, and ritual immediacy, the work of art has today become a discursive instrument, occasionally powerful, rarely transformative, and often a mere commodity.

I agree. But Benjamin is concerned about “art” and making things, as well as about human community and how it receives and uses what we make. There is another and positively revelatory side to the reality of “mechanical reproduction,” especially that of art. In the recording or photograph we discern something of the mystery of time: an act of rich and inexhaustible divine mercy.

I cannot but be amazed as I hear the elderly Mischa Elman play the Brahms violin sonata in G in a recording from 1961. Elman died when I was barely ten. I never heard him in person, alas. But now I can listen to at least something of his performance. Not only that, I am hearing Brahms, who wrote the sonata in the late 1870s. I am not hearing Brahms speaking or playing, but am instead encountering a real element of what Brahms conceived in his mind and heart, wrote down, shared, and himself listened to when performed. It is right to call all this—Elman, Brahms, an 1879 sonata—the “past.” And in my listening, the past reemerges, taking a place beside me, affecting me even in a physical way (I weep, I laugh). This is a kind of miracle. The miracle is one of technology (“mechanical reproduction”) only peripherally. Rather, the greater miracle is God’s creation. It is open, somehow, to many “times.” It can be the place of many gifts and glories.

Time is complex, and it is so in a completely “baffling” manner. I choose the word carefully. The word “baffle” has a debated etymology. It may be a word that coalesced its meaning from several divergent origins—old French, Scottish, Spanish, all providing unrelated but similar-sounding words that bespeak disgrace and mockery, abuse and ribald insult, finally coming together in a single English term. To be “baffled” is to be embarrassingly upended—bewildered. Somewhere in the later nineteenth century, the word took a turn into mechanics: one “baffled” an oven flame by redirecting its heat away from human touch. Today we speak of baffled air in a vent system or baffled sounds in audio components. Digital security programs baffle cyberattacks. This mechanical sense informed contemporary French usage. It has re-embraced the word—the modern noun baffle—that it originally gave away to English.

Time is baffling. It not only upends us, confuses us, but also takes the life of things and reorders it in ways that touch us now only indirectly, but nevertheless truly. Time is baffling, bewildering and generous both; time lets us live with all things in ways that permit their grace to reach us. Mischa Elman and Brahms: They are no longer with us, yet they were there for me in the time of listening. The same holds true for Homer, illustrations from old children’s books, a souvenir from our wounding childhoods, the bits of blue glass picked up from a garbage dump. The life they hold, not only once in times past, but even now, reaches us through many means, from memory to preserved artifact to commercial reproduction. All glorious miracles.

We sometimes speak metaphorically: The statement “the past is still with us” indicates how things that happened long ago continue to shape who we are today. I would go further. In a completely nonmetaphorical sense the past is not dead. The entire realm of creation lurks behind time’s baffles, sometimes sticking its traces through the openings and pushing out scattered profiles, sometimes simply touching our hearts with its infinitely varied yet inexplicable movements that emerge in the form of buried emotions coming to life. On the other side of time’s baffling, there is the entire world of teeming life.

Obviously, Mischa Elman’s “presence” to me through a recording is quite different in kind from St. Paul’s presence in the Communion of Saints, where, we might claim, Paul intercedes for us before the throne of Christ. Different in kind, but not in origin and revelation. The “God of the living and not of the dead” (Mark 12:27) stands behind both Elman and St. Paul, and his offering of their gifts unveils divine mercy and beauty, sometimes terrifying (why else does the Lord permit the reproduction of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch?), but always sustaining. One of the baffles of time is, of course, death itself. Yet behind temporal death surges the life of all that God has made, pressing in, like the oven’s fire, against the walls of our limitations, now turned in new directions, diverted into ducts and pipes so that the fire of life can warm rather than burn away.

Time is baffling in a protective, merciful way. Too much! Too many people! Too many things to encounter and take in and understand (John 16:12)! The study of history has become a Sisyphean venture to un-baffle the world. Statistics, layers of refuse in a desert, mounds of newspaper articles, piles of bills, diaries, letters. Individual historical studies are like seas, and specialized disciplines like oceans. The burden isn’t only “information overload.” The insurmountable obstacle we face is the weight of “too much,” too much creation for one creature (or two or twenty). “I am only a child!” (Jer. 1:6). And the attempt to uncover all of creation—something modern historians seem at least tacitly driven to accomplish—has become deadly, now almost deliberately slamming our inquisitive spirits against the tide of gargantuan numbers even while promising some impossible moral illumination through this vain, Promethean effort.

We shall never understand, comprehend, or appreciate the fullness of what God has imagined and made (Ps. 139:17). The Faustian spirit of human acquisitiveness may despair at our incapacity. But it should not! For God made time to portion out this fullness, to baffle, for the delight of his creatures. A little Elman; a little Pindar; a little, if profound, sorrow at our past misfortunes; a little peek at the face of our disappeared beloved. Too little? Hardly, for these are glimpses of something alive, something to be pursued and cherished. These are more than personal possessions, private memories, or solitary encounters. Baffled time conveys the warmth of the fullness of creation’s grace-filled life. Mechanical reproduction is—leaving aside the question of aesthetics and human society—a generous permission by God, betokening the life beyond time’s bafflement.

Paul Robeson, Burl Ives, Johnny Cash, and many others since have provided moving renditions of the old American folk hymn “I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger.” One can listen to recordings of them (or sing it oneself). I’m “traveling through this world of woe,” the song says, along pathways that are “rough and steep,” troubling, bewildering. But “over Jordan,” time’s baffled boundaries, lies the land of fathers and mothers, children and friends, the whole realm of the Savior’s bounty—“home,” crowding into our passage even now.

Ephraim Radner is professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College.

Image by Nicolas Poussin, public domain. Image cropped.