by Ben Diamond, Psy.D., Managing Editor

How long do I have to wait for you, honey? - Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings

Waiting can be a one- or a two-person game. Notice the thought, but don’t say it yet. Finish the page, lick your finger before turning; don’t hurry. Many tiny everyday movements become thrilling if we linger; many thoughts become terrifying so we don’t. There’s pleasure in waiting, and being waited for, and how long is long enough? How long can you restrain yourself? Can you really restrain yourself?

Glenn Gould recorded two versions of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, one at 22, in 1955, and the other in 1981, mere months before his untimely death. Much has been made of the differences... In 1981 they’re slower, more measured, some say mystical…and yet they’re so even they are also excruciating. (That must be the point.) The younger, brasher, faster Gould was onto something, and carries me away, where the elder version of that self aimed at something else, higher and plainer. Listening to both recordings again and again, whatever I thought the differences might illustrate seems harder to put into words than I bargained for. The variations need the aria; the parts don’t make sense until they’ve become the whole, one at a time…which is something like being in analysis: my germinal idea turns out to have been the seed of a plant I didn’t know could grow on this continent.

There’s repetition and there’s variation. Before we had Freud to teach us about them, we had Bach. We ought to know something about each–repetition and variation. 1981, call it mundanely sublime, makes the internal repetition within each variation clearer, and it’s actually painful–it’s too much, too much beauty, too much care, too much clarity, so restrained it hurts. In 1955 it all goes by faster, thankfully, and the echoes among the variations are easier to hold. All I seem to be able to say is that 1955 puts me closer to a personal pronoun, a Gouldness carrying me along, and in 1981 I’m under the orders of a force majeure, awful and tantalizing. Sometimes you play the repeats, sometimes they play you.

To exercise restraint, to be restrained, is to wait, and risk what might come next if we let it. To know the notes so well that something more emerges from the familiar score–menacing, some days, but in a good way. Repetition begets trust until it surprises us–who could have predicted this? If we're lucky, the surprise germinates, doesn’t overwhelm, and now we’re playing, even if we’re a little bit scared.