Lagniappe (An Occasional Feature): The Piper at the Gates of the PAC

November 24, 2008 by djackson.

Our island hosts a phantom piper. Whether ghost or demigod, woodwose or wild man I cannot say, but he haunts the borders of our sea-belted strand and wails out mysterious spells.

All right, it’s actually some unknown college student playing the bagpipes in front of the Performing Arts Center on Sunday afternoons, but let me have a little fun.

And there is a certain element of mystery here. My wife studies music at the university. She’s asked around in the fairly small community of music students. This guy isn’t in the department. And I’ve heard him playing in the predawn dark way out on the edge of our campus - the School of Christian Studies’ campus - by the marshes that fringe the Cayo del Oso. I’ve glimpsed him down on the little beach, that manufactured strand of sand bunkered by rocky breakwaters that face Corpus Christi Bay. Mostly, I hear him on Sunday afternoons as I walk back from the gym. When the wind whips from the proper quarter to whisk the sound toward me, I catch those distant, martial strains as they wail faintly across the blacktop.

Of course, I could just trot across the asphalt and ’round the front of the building and shake the guy’s hand and ask him his name. I could do that, but it would be so prosaic. The Holmesian reductionism that ruthlessly deconstructs all experience to fact may increase knowledge but it shrinks our wisdom. Maybe I’d just rather not know. Or maybe I somehow think I can know more by not knowing. Or maybe, as with Moses, God reveals himself to me most powerfully when he hides me from his face. Perhaps the fading notes of the divine retreat are as much as my spirit can stand. Arnold, for all his army of hired gumshepherds, would rather not collar the Scholar Gypsy. Keats doesn’t want to hit “play” on the frieze-frame of the Grecian urn. Really, he’d rather not know “What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?” I’m somehow determined not to look a gift piper in the mouthpiece.

Part of this must be the instrument itself. The marshal pulse of those pipes as they skirl a highland tune never fails to elevate my heart rate and put the paddles to my flat-lined imagination. To put it in the language of C. S. Lewis:

Once the emotional response is well aroused it begets imaginings. Dim ideas of inconsolable sorrows, brilliant revelry, or well-fought fields, arise. Increasingly it is these that we really enjoy. The very tune itself, let alone the use the composer makes of it and the quality of the performance, almost sinks out of hearing. As regards one instrument (the bagpipes) I am still in this condition. I can’t tell one piece from another, nor a good piper from a bad. It is all just “pipes”, all equally intoxicating, heartrending, orgiastic.

But some of it must also be the fortuitous elusiveness (for I have no indication he is trying to hide from me; no slouch hat and black cape or secret passageways through the PAC leading to some dark layer beneath the basement) of the piper himself. I revel in the opportunity to use this as a doorway into the world of one of my favorite books, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. In chapter seven, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” the Mole and the Water Rat set out in their punt in response to an Amber Alert issued for the missing son of the Otter. They skull along by moonlight and row right into the thin place of mystical encounter. Rat hears it first and sits forward in the prow.

“It’s gone!” sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. “So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!” he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spell-bound. “Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,” he said presently. “O, Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call of it is stronger even than the music is sweet!”

The two friends eventually meet the piper, and he turns out to be an embodiment of the author’s New Paganism. That fact could disturb a Christian reader, especially a fundamentalist-cum-Christian Mystic who still vaguely suspects this whole path to be a deception, the light at the end of the tunnel only a will-o-the-wisp, St. Elmo’s Fire drawing him into the bog of pantheism. But Peter Green, Grahame’s biographer, argues that this particular Pan “contains in his pagan body something of those Christian traits which Grahame sought for so long and never found.” Lewis, at any rate, could find in the passage an acceptable place to begin the Christian quest. In the “Introductory” to The Problem of Pain Lewis, a huge fan of The Wind in the Willows, cites this account as a good example of the combined love and terror toward the divine that inhabits all human hearts. He quotes a later snippet of dialogue:

“Rat,” he found breath to whisper, shaking, “Are you afraid?” “Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid? of Him? O, never, never. And yet - and yet - O Mole, I am afraid.”

In the end, the brave duo rescue their little friend and mercifully forget their brush with the divine. Moses veils his face because Israel cannot yet bear even reflected holiness. God molds; he does not blast. Maybe I don’t walk those few steps across the pavement and around the building because I fear that to come closer would be my death. Probably I don’t because I fear that it wouldn’t.

But I hope the piper keeps playing.

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