Middle C

Have you heard of Middle C?

If you have not, Middle C is simply a note people often use to find their place in music. Someone shows you where it is, and you can find where you’re placed from there.

After a while you stop thinking about it. You do not need to keep returning to Middle C every time you play a note. You have found your place, and now you can move.

It has not gone anywhere.

You could find it again if you needed to.

That is probably why references become so easy to miss. Once they work, they disappear into everything that follows.

Architecture is full of them. A drawing at 1:20 only works because the person drawing it and the person reading it already share enough to know what that means. The line on the page is not the wall. It gives the wall a place that somebody else can recover. Once that is established, the drawing can travel without me. A builder can pick it up somewhere else and still find where things are placed.

Music does this in a way you can hear.

My brother played guitar. I was a drummer, so tuning usually meant I had to stop for a bit. Every drummer knows that part. There is not much point trying to tune a guitar while somebody is hitting drums beside you.

He had a tuner, but often one note was enough. Once he had somewhere to start, he could bring the rest of the guitar into relation with it. If he was playing with a keyboard or piano, someone might give him an E and he would tune to that instead. What mattered was that the instruments were going to play together.

Near the end he would sometimes use harmonics. He would lightly touch the strings in particular places and sound two clear tones together. When they were slightly out, you could hear it. Something wavered between them. He would make a small adjustment and try again.

I could hear it too.

I did not know what he knew about the guitar. I could not have told you which string needed to move or by how much. I did not have any of that. But once those two tones were sounding together, the difference between them became available to me as well.

That has stayed with me.

The two tones did not teach me the guitar.

They gave me somewhere to hear from.

It is the same thing the drawing does. A builder does not need to know how I arrived at the layout. He needs somewhere to find things from. Once he has that, he can read what is there, including where I have got it wrong.

A reference gives you somewhere to find yourself from.

And once two people can use the same reference, something more happens. They can begin from different places and still find one another.

Someone had to find the place first.

Someone else had to be able to find it too.

We call that sharing.

We call it agreement.

We make standards and measurements and clocks and notation and words. After a while those things feel as though they were always there.

Children make this visible because they have not yet learned which references adults have stopped noticing.

My wife and I will tell our children something completely ordinary and one of them will ask why. Sometimes the answer is easy. Sometimes I start explaining and realise I do not actually know.

I know the saying.

I know the rule.

I know the advice.

I know who told me.

That is not always the same as knowing what it rests on.

The question why? can send you backwards through a surprising amount of your own life. Sometimes I get back to something I have seen myself. Sometimes I get back to somebody I trust. Sometimes to a study, a teacher, a family habit, a story, a belief.

Those are different places.

It matters to me that I know which one I am standing on.

My children have asked me if God is real.

I tell them yes.

That is what I believe.

They can ask me why, and I can tell them. Then they can keep asking.

The children still begin the same way we all do: inside relations they did not create.

Before they can decide what family means, they are already in one.

Before they can decide what language means, people are already speaking to them.

Before they can question the clock, bedtime has already arrived.

They are carried into a world that has already been placed.

Then slowly they begin finding where they are placed within it.

I used to think words such as share and agree belonged mostly to language. I do not anymore.

The words come afterwards.

A baby can orient toward a person without knowing their name.

Two musicians can find one another before either of them explains what they are doing.

Two people can lift something together without defining cooperation.

Something becomes available between them.

Then we give it a name.

The word helps us return to it. It helps us carry it somewhere else. But the word is not where the relation began.

That is probably why I keep coming back to Middle C.

It is such a small thing.

Someone shows you where it is.

You find where you are placed from there.

Then you can stop thinking about it.

It has not gone anywhere.

My wife’s name is Calita. I call her C. So do people close to her. She is not a middle child. She is second oldest.

But she is definitely my Middle C.

Before we had children, there was us. That relation is still there. Now we are parents as well. We are married. We belong to families that were there before our children and before our marriage.

Those relations overlap all the time, but they are not the same relation.

Calita is a daughter in one family,

a sister in another relation,

my wife,

my partner,

a mother to our children,

and her own person throughout all of them.

Different place, same person.

The same is true of me.

Sometimes parenting takes up so much space that we have to find the couple again. Sometimes family reaches into marriage. Sometimes being husband and wife is different from simply being the two people who chose each other in the first place.

The boundaries matter.

I used to call some of that sacred.

I still think it fits.

Some relations need enough room to remain themselves.

Middle C does not tell the music what to become.

It gives you somewhere to find where you are placed.

And it stays there while you go.