For years Zambuka spoke about fighting himself. He fought himself out of bed, fought into the practice room, fought from the refrigerator at midnight, fought away from difficult phone calls, fought through airports, grant applications, rehearsals, motel rooms and the despair that sometimes settled without asking permission. “I’m battling myself,” he would say. The phrase felt perfectly reasonable.

Then one afternoon, while practising, he stopped in the middle of a phrase. The sentence suddenly sounded ridiculous. Who exactly was fighting whom? Wasn’t he one person? One brain. One nervous system. One collection of cells with the curious habit to refer to themselves as “I.” Then how could one side keep defeating the other? When he ate the cake he had promised himself he wouldn’t eat, who won? When he resisted the cake, who lost? If he procrastinated and then finally answered the difficult email, which version of Zambuka prevailed? It was like a civil war inside a nation populated by a single citizen.

He noticed how casually people divided themselves into imaginary opponents. “I couldn’t help myself.” “I talked myself into it.” “I’m disappointed in myself.” The grammar suggested tenants crowded into a boarding house, while biology insisted only one occupant was paying rent. One evening, he remained alone at the piano. He played a single note. Then another. Then another. Perhaps he misunderstood music all these years as well.

A fugue is not one melody defeating another. Independent lines wander, collide, separate, imitate, interrupt and occasionally comfort one another. The miracle isn’t that one voice triumphs. The miracle is that none have to. Perhaps such was consciousness. What he had been calling weakness was maybe one line becoming louder, just a wee bit. Many emotions and none need to be silenced. They merely needed to discover they belonged in the same composition.

From that evening onward, whenever he thought, “I’m fighting myself,” he imagined a conductor stopping an orchestra because the oboes disagreed with the cellos. Maybe a human life was less like a solo than a fugue, with every contradictory impulse entering on its own cue, each convinced it carried the melody, until somewhere beyond the hearing of the performers, all the separate lines became harmony.

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