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On Rushing
Saturday, 14 April 2007 10:51 pmI thought these two news stories fit together well, on a topic I appreciate: stillness and modern life.
Yann Martel and 49 other Canadian artists were invited to Parliament to commemorate 50 years of the Canadian Council of the Arts. Their perfunctory reception by Canada's lawmakers gave him an idea: sending books to Stephen Harper. His article is a good read.
"On March 28th, 2007, at 3 pm, I was sitting in the Visitors’ Gallery of the House of Commons, I and forty-nine other artists from across Canada, fifty in all, and I got to thinking about stillness. To read a book, one must be still. To watch a concert, a play, a movie, to look at a painting, one must be still. Religion, too, makes use of stillness, notably with prayer and meditation. Just gazing upon a still lake, upon a quiet winter scene—doesn’t that lull us into contemplation? Life, it seems, favours moments of stillness to appear on the edges of our perception and whisper to us, “Here I am. What do you think?” Then we become busy and the stillness vanishes, yet we hardly notice because we fall so easily for the delusion of busyness, whereby what keeps us busy must be important, and the busier we are with it, the more important it must be. And so we work, work, work, rush, rush, rush. On occasion we say to ourselves, panting, “Gosh, life is racing by.” But that’s not it at all, it’s the contrary: life is still. It is we who are racing by.
I was thinking about that, about stillness, and I was also thinking, more prosaically, about arts funding, not surprising since we fifty artists were there in the House to help celebrate the fifty years of the Canada Council for the Arts, that towering institution that has done so much to foster the identity of Canadians. I was thinking that to have a bare-bones approach to arts funding, as the present Conservative government has, to think of the arts as mere entertainment, to be indulged in after the serious business of life, that—in conjunction with retooling education so that it centres on the teaching of employable skills rather than the creating of thinking citizens—is to engineer souls that are post-historical, post-literate and pre-robotic; that is, blank souls wired to be unfulfilled and susceptible to conformism at its worst—intolerance and totalitarianism—because incapable of thinking for themselves, and vowed to a life of frustrated serfdom at the service of the feudal lords of profit."
What happens during the commemoration is a bit of a letdown to Mr. Martel. They're afforded less than five minutes of polite attention from the Parliament, and it doesn't seem that Stephen Harper even looks up. Mr. Martel's response is interesting; which I'll let you read yourself if you like.
The second story I came across yesterday was this from the Washington Post, in which some DC newsmen perform an experiment: "What would happen if one of the world's great violinists performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?"
What happens, again, is a bit of a letdown for the experimenters. Joshua Bell played violin at a rush-hour Metro stop for 45 minutes- a virtuoso performance, on a Stradivarius, and barely anyone paid him the slightest attention. One woman who worked there was sufficiently impressed with his performance that she didn't call the police on him; a few people stopped to listen 3 or 10 minutes; he made 30-odd dollars in tips.
The article's long; the bulk of it is the newsmen shaking their heads at our busy-ness, our single-minded roboticness, and a bit at their naivete for assuming there would be massive crowds stopping to listen to Bell play.
I was thinking about this, and I think they've made two errors. The first is that they're shooting fish in a barrel. The Metro at rush-hour will, by definition, contain people who are rushing. It would be a more compelling bit of research if (say) two-thirds as many people completely ignored him over the lunch-hour But of course rush hour will look like Life Out of Balance.
Their second error is philosophical. They call this an "experiment in context, perception and priorities". They say the context of the art matters, and the Metro station just isn't an optimal context to appreciate high-quality art. But there's another important bit: intention. Every one of the people who ignored Bell's playing were probably trying to get to somewhere more soothing than a subway station. It is damned difficult to meditate or be mentally still in rush-hour. In a subway, the closest to stillness I can find is playing my own sound-track or wearing earplugs. And that quiet can be pretty darned valuable. So in a sense, the quality of this art is irrelevent, if one has other intentions, such as getting the hell out of the train station to somewhere calmer.
I honestly don't know what my reaction would be, to a virtuoso violin player who was interrupting my quiet time during a city commute. Maybe I'd be curious and listen. Maybe not. I do know that I will pay attention to things that surprise me, so I think I probably would listen.
One person who stopped and listened said that he doesn't know classical music, but this performance made him feel at peace. Is that an invalidation of my argument? Or can daring public art be both peaceful, and an infernal racket?
Yann Martel and 49 other Canadian artists were invited to Parliament to commemorate 50 years of the Canadian Council of the Arts. Their perfunctory reception by Canada's lawmakers gave him an idea: sending books to Stephen Harper. His article is a good read.
"On March 28th, 2007, at 3 pm, I was sitting in the Visitors’ Gallery of the House of Commons, I and forty-nine other artists from across Canada, fifty in all, and I got to thinking about stillness. To read a book, one must be still. To watch a concert, a play, a movie, to look at a painting, one must be still. Religion, too, makes use of stillness, notably with prayer and meditation. Just gazing upon a still lake, upon a quiet winter scene—doesn’t that lull us into contemplation? Life, it seems, favours moments of stillness to appear on the edges of our perception and whisper to us, “Here I am. What do you think?” Then we become busy and the stillness vanishes, yet we hardly notice because we fall so easily for the delusion of busyness, whereby what keeps us busy must be important, and the busier we are with it, the more important it must be. And so we work, work, work, rush, rush, rush. On occasion we say to ourselves, panting, “Gosh, life is racing by.” But that’s not it at all, it’s the contrary: life is still. It is we who are racing by.
I was thinking about that, about stillness, and I was also thinking, more prosaically, about arts funding, not surprising since we fifty artists were there in the House to help celebrate the fifty years of the Canada Council for the Arts, that towering institution that has done so much to foster the identity of Canadians. I was thinking that to have a bare-bones approach to arts funding, as the present Conservative government has, to think of the arts as mere entertainment, to be indulged in after the serious business of life, that—in conjunction with retooling education so that it centres on the teaching of employable skills rather than the creating of thinking citizens—is to engineer souls that are post-historical, post-literate and pre-robotic; that is, blank souls wired to be unfulfilled and susceptible to conformism at its worst—intolerance and totalitarianism—because incapable of thinking for themselves, and vowed to a life of frustrated serfdom at the service of the feudal lords of profit."
What happens during the commemoration is a bit of a letdown to Mr. Martel. They're afforded less than five minutes of polite attention from the Parliament, and it doesn't seem that Stephen Harper even looks up. Mr. Martel's response is interesting; which I'll let you read yourself if you like.
The second story I came across yesterday was this from the Washington Post, in which some DC newsmen perform an experiment: "What would happen if one of the world's great violinists performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?"
What happens, again, is a bit of a letdown for the experimenters. Joshua Bell played violin at a rush-hour Metro stop for 45 minutes- a virtuoso performance, on a Stradivarius, and barely anyone paid him the slightest attention. One woman who worked there was sufficiently impressed with his performance that she didn't call the police on him; a few people stopped to listen 3 or 10 minutes; he made 30-odd dollars in tips.
The article's long; the bulk of it is the newsmen shaking their heads at our busy-ness, our single-minded roboticness, and a bit at their naivete for assuming there would be massive crowds stopping to listen to Bell play.
I was thinking about this, and I think they've made two errors. The first is that they're shooting fish in a barrel. The Metro at rush-hour will, by definition, contain people who are rushing. It would be a more compelling bit of research if (say) two-thirds as many people completely ignored him over the lunch-hour But of course rush hour will look like Life Out of Balance.
Their second error is philosophical. They call this an "experiment in context, perception and priorities". They say the context of the art matters, and the Metro station just isn't an optimal context to appreciate high-quality art. But there's another important bit: intention. Every one of the people who ignored Bell's playing were probably trying to get to somewhere more soothing than a subway station. It is damned difficult to meditate or be mentally still in rush-hour. In a subway, the closest to stillness I can find is playing my own sound-track or wearing earplugs. And that quiet can be pretty darned valuable. So in a sense, the quality of this art is irrelevent, if one has other intentions, such as getting the hell out of the train station to somewhere calmer.
I honestly don't know what my reaction would be, to a virtuoso violin player who was interrupting my quiet time during a city commute. Maybe I'd be curious and listen. Maybe not. I do know that I will pay attention to things that surprise me, so I think I probably would listen.
One person who stopped and listened said that he doesn't know classical music, but this performance made him feel at peace. Is that an invalidation of my argument? Or can daring public art be both peaceful, and an infernal racket?
