It has been a long journey to and from Q-Inspired, and for me as a person … a great loop through the pandemic, and surviving Covid-19, and noticing that in some ways life has gone on but has changed forever from 2020 … of returning to the classical music and the second language that I loved in my youth to find means to understand what has happened to me in these two years … this song is almost my complete story.
It is all very strange – I have just known about this song by Gustav Mahler with lyrics by Friedrich Rückert for a week, and I discovered it as part of a long process I have been doing in remembering things that I seem to forget for ten years at a time. I work in and around several forms of traditional African American music and it is my core as a musician now, but I became a pianist and composer because of classical music.
I studied German as my second language because of my love for Beethoven and Bach. I was seeking better understanding of the culture from which the music comes … of course I know that 18th and 19th century Germany is no more, and I know of course know – and studied – the worldwide tragedies that occurred in Germany in the 20th century along with the nation's long recovery … but what I discovered is a thread of life that is not dissimilar to that in African American life at its best … love of life in harmony with other men and with nature. I could not have told anyone that in my teens and twenties, but I understand the harmony now between the traditional way in which I was raised and the best of traditional German culture.
At the same time, I have been journeying through the pandemic and had my own up close and personal encounter with Covid-19 in the springtime of this year … it took months to recover all my strength, which means that a life simplified already by the pandemic became even more simple.
The surprise to me, while most other people are desperately trying to get back to the way life was before, is that I am not – that I want no parts of it.
I have felt since 2020 – but could not articulate as clearly a week ago – that in a way Covid-19 freed me from many of the unnecessary things in life that I was doing to please other people who were chasing significance in the world. I have been having conversations with other African American women who also have been making the same discovery, because in our communities we are expected to hold up so much … but now we have all discovered that not everything needs holding up, nor is it necessary for us to do it all.
While having all these thoughts and discoveries, I have been following my favorite bass, Kurt Möll, around YouTube (about which song discoveries Q-Inspired will hear more later), and while doing that, I discovered bass-baritone Jose van Dam. One of the most beautiful recordings of his is “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” and since I was listening to everything of his, I discovered this song and was stunned by it, because I do not know the works of Mahler all that well.
Then, of course, I had to do the “Do I just like it because it is Jose van Dam?” test .... nope. This song is amazing, period … another amazing recording was made by the late, great soprano Jessye Norman …
… and in the comments of this one I discovered from actual native Germans that she is one of the few English-speaking performers who they feel has really captured the meanings of the lyrics that do not come over into English very well.
Now, I love a mystery, and German is my second language although I am somewhat out of practice.
So, I went back and looked at the title compared to how it is generally translated: Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen generally is translated to “I am lost to the world” … but I remembered that verloren is the ordinary word for “lost” in German.
That started me thinking … German is one of the parents of English. When in English we say that someone is “lost and forlorn,” we are saying the same thing twice: “forlorn” and verloren are sitting right there. But then we get around to how forlorn and forsaken are often used together … and then the word “abandon” comes around … looks a little like abhanden, doesn't it?
Then I thought about the grammar … in German, the first verb has to be the second word of the sentence unless a question is being asked, and all the other verbs have to go to the end of the sentence. Kommen is “come,” and gekommen is present perfect, or “have come.” So, I tried an exact translation, word for word: “I am [to] the world abandoned have come,” and then tried to put it back into English grammar: “I have come to abandonment to the world.” That says a little more than “I am lost to the world” … it leaves open exactly who did the abandoning and why.
As I discovered with further study, abhanden means “gone,” in the sense of being out of the reach of the hand. See “hand” right there in the middle? The word in German for hand is hand, as it happens, and that little “ab” means out of, gone from, something like that.
So, that would mean that “I have gone beyond reach of the world,” or, “I have come to a place beyond reach of the world” might also work … there has been some kind of movement, a journey, and the person singing the story has somehow arrived at this moment of realization … a boundary has been crossed.
I find myself wondering in my own case … when was the boundary crossed for me? I had wanted to simplify my life and had started even before 2020; I had begun making time to walk for hours alone or with one friend a few times a week to get out of the merry-go-round of work, community work, and social events at which I was expected. Obviously, Covid-19 closed down almost all of that … but another world opened to me here on Hive in February 2020, and Hive is still outside the thought of the world at large … but what a world, full of creative, freedom-loving people, so different from most of the rest!
Here on Hive I had time and space to rediscover myself as a composer and arranger, and a fractal artist:
… in addition to finding a place to share the one thing I permitted myself every day even before Hive and its predecessor: I always make time to write, daily.
In addition, unlike the storyteller in the song, I am not quite alone: my retired parents are vorhanden, at hand, present, still very much alive, and in need of particular kinds of support during the pandemic for their safety.
I also have several parks within walking distance of me, and local hills to hike on. Since the pandemic I have been able to extend my time exploring them to several times a week, and from the summer through the late autumn, I can pick my own breakfast or lunch in fruits from these!
Meanwhile, I have relatives and friends listening to President Biden talking about the pandemic is over, and running to do all the things they felt they missed in the previous two years … but I have no desire to do that.
I am also a Christian, and one of the greatly neglected but clearly delineated doctrines is found in I John: “Love not the world, nor the things in the world, for if any man loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” This is not talking about the physical planet Earth. “The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof, the world, and they that dwell therein,” says the Scripture in Psalm 24, and there is nothing wrong with enjoying this planet. Man was made in a garden, after all, which I often think of when eating the various types of delicious fruits that I find around me.
But, at the time the apostle John wrote, the world system of European imperial conquest was in the Roman form, and the Romans were more efficient in reducing people for their personal profit than anything we have seen since, given the limitations of the ancient world. Think about when Caesar Augustus ordered that all the world be taxed – you know that at the first Christmas, nobody had an Excel spreadsheet or even a computer or printing press, right?
Imagine the bean-counting bureaucracy and the utterly ruthless and inescapable enforcement the Romans had in place such that a carpenter from a little no-account town called Nazareth named Joseph knew he had to take himself and his virgin but heavily pregnant fiancee Mary to Bethlehem to be taxed – or else. Imagine the struggle to survive in that system for everyone not a Roman, and the struggle to do as the Romans did to be accepted by them, and the struggle of constantly being compared to the Romans and granted or denied favor and status in life based on that comparison even by one's own conquered people.
Everything old, in a European-dominated world system, is new again … but, now as then, there were always people whose ambitions lay outside of the chase of being accepted as “somebody” in the dominant culture … the artist and artisan, the spiritual, the intellectual, the teacher, the healer … to whom “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life,” as the apostle says in defining the characteristics of the world system, are not as heavy a concern. Many such people are content having enough to do what they are called to do.
It so happens that I am a devout Christian who is an artist, an intellectual, and a teacher.
Might it be, then, that Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, translated even simply as “I am lost to the world,” might not be so terrible a thing to a person like me?
Still further, might it even be that I have come to the point that “I have gone beyond the reach of the world” might be because the world system no longer has a pull on me – abhanden meaning out of hand, and therefore also, out of GRIP?
As it happens, the song suggests this, at least according to the translation on Musixmatch: “I am lost to the world/With which otherwise I spoiled a lot of time.” The singer goes on to say – and we will go back to Jose van Dam's pronoun, he – that he has been gone for so long that the world may think he has died … and he does not care at all about it!
I remember the anxiety of the early days of the pandemic, mingled with the relief of not having to be bothered with many things once considered essential … the peace it brought to my life … and, more recently, the relief of the lull in the pandemic combined with the cool clarity of not being willing to return to the run-around, and that those who will miss me as they return will have to accept that my absence is their new reality. They will go on, and I will be lost to their pursuits, and that is OK. I do care, actually … but I cannot go back.
The singer then returns to ask the question, according to the Musixmatch translation: “Does she [the world] think I'm dead?” He then goes on to say that if the world does, he will not argue it – for he has indeed died to the world!
It is said in many places in the Scripture that the Christian is alive to Christ, dead to sin, and of course that throws out “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” that dominates the world system … although in the American context few Christians ever think about this, this would mean that if we were living properly in Christ, we should be able to say what the singer is singing, no longer engaging in even the common vices and distractions of the age and “dead” to those who find their life in such things.
Musixmatch next has the translation: “I died in the turmoil of the world,” but I am side-eyeing that because Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel does not have the German for “in” visibly in it, and so to my limited skills still comes out “I am died TO the world-tumbling” or “world-tumult” – which then opens up a whole different door because the philosopher Hegel at roughly this same time in history was talking about the “World Spirit” who eventually was going to give Germany its turn to have the greatest empire in the world. We know what that idea led to in the 20th century, but the singer has gotten off that train of thought entirely, and instead has come to rest in a quiet place, and then found his heaven in what he loves the most: his song!
I cannot say that personally I have arrived in heaven just yet, but I have followed the journey of this song to the quiet place... “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” has given me the language to understand much of the reality of my current situation, and why I am content with it. I am actually a person of great responsibility in my city, but I am not chasing recognition or titles … I am in the world, but not of it any more. I have been headed out of it for a long time, and like it occurs to the singer of the song one particular day, the realization has come to me.
However, I find that it is not as lonely as the singer finds it – although he enjoys being alone and does not mind. Today, there are people on minimalist journeys and slow living journeys and various others, regaining the old ways of living in the world while not being utterly dominated mentally and spiritually by the system … and then there is this new way called Hive. The quiet place is large, and there are an increasingly large number of people who know how to live in it … when you know you belong in the quiet place, then you can find your people in it.
It is also not possible for a Christian to be entirely alone … I love being in Creation, communing and fellowshipping with the Creator, and when my parents have passed on and when other relatives and friends are doing what they enjoy, then I will find what there is of Heaven to have on this Earth, with my Lord, and all the song He is willing to share with me, until I go to Him where He is.
Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen … I have gone from the reach of the world, where I once wasted much of my time … I have been gone so long it might think me dead, but I do not care and will not argue the point, for I have died to the world's tumult and come to rest in a quiet place … thus far, I have come, and this song sings of much of my own journey since the beginning of the pandemic.