teahouse1We had a nice impromptu meeting at the Embassy. The house had actually been locked up because of a security problem and nobody had a key. Fraulein Landgrebe and I were standing disconsolately outside the front door like Latchkey Kids sans latchkey (actually we weren’t disconsolate at all, we were having a lovely chat). When Miss Yatsenko popped along she had the intelligent idea (why didn’t we?) of adjourning to the lovely tea house on the roof.

Since we used to spend all our time in said tea house before the downstairs began to be furnished, I can’t imagine why I didn’t think thereof. But I then I am well known for being a well-known Chinese snack known as a Dim Shroom.

Then – joy of joys – my beloved Cousin, returned from Japan, was able to pop in and take tea with us.

Miss Yatsenko was talking fascinatingly to Fraulein Landgrebe about music. She is dreadfully expert in the mathematics of musical theory and listens to Bach with a pen and paper, analysing the creative mathematics. To a shroom who loves but cannot even read music, this was more than impressive.

Die Fraulein is a wonderful linguist and organiser, Miss Yatsenko clearly a musical sorceress, dear Yu-chei is far clever at Japanese than my poor smatterings, and so knowledgeable about Chinese as well as being an accomplished Vikhelic artist (and blonde too!) We are surrounded by such clever maidens, I feel more than ever like the family Dim Shroom.

Miss Fraulein quoted an atheist who said “There is no God, but if there were, Bach would be God”. Curiously – or perhaps not curiously – this is a wonderfully precise inversion of the truth, for “God geometrises always” as Plato said. Mathematics, as Sai Hermya taught (the very ancient one – not Hermya of Rayapurh), and as the Tellurian Pythagoreans knew, is the very basis of the universe in a way far different from that imagined by modern physics (although the mathematical approach of modern physics perhaps stands to traditional cosmology in the relation of a peasant pidgin to a high sacred language long forgotten).

I too love Bach and much other music, and though I cannot analyse it (I should love to learn) I somehow feel its relation to the Music of the Spheres. I spoke to a wise Ranya once about whether it was meet for a child of the Motherland (even in exile) so to adore the works of the Outlander, and she said “Why, my child, do you suppose it is called music? Because, where it is true and pure it is written directly by the Muse, through the hand of whomever she chooses.”

So I feel truly that in Bach I am listening not to the music of a mascul, but of the Angels.