“The willingness,” [says Elaine Scarry] “to continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep across through a certain patch of sky.”I think that is why I’ve always appreciated having friends in whose company you learnt new things, who helped you, because of their superior eye and taste and knowledge, to learn to develop your own sensibilities and sense of what is beautiful and what is fit. I thought of this very thing last month, when a photographer friend showed me two (to me) similar photos. I like this one, I offered, looking (as I tend to) at the dancer’s technical grace, but he showed me why the other was compositionally superior as a photo, because of the points of light in it. I remember that when we were in college K (who had a voracious appetite for music of all genres) used to make me mixed tapes of things he thought interesting. Whenever I got one in the post I would wait till Friday night (when my roommate would be out at a party) and put the tape on a little louder than usual and listened to whatever was on it. There could be anything on it from a piece of electronic music to an opera aria to bossa nova to early music, it was exciting: one track would be an Astor Piazzola tango and the next might be a liturgical plainchant by Hildegard von Bingen, the next piece could be the Kronos Quartet playing Philip Glass and after that it would be an interpretation of a jazz standard by some new a cappella group. The first time I’d ever heard Wynton Marsalis play was on one of those tapes (I remembered this suddenly when Marsalis gave the CEN lectures at Harvard a few weeks ago). The tapes came with K’s notes on what he thought was interesting about each piece, showing you what to listen for, how to hear the structure, helping you learn why something was beautiful (just like Onno and Ada and Max, I thought), which was more than merely a question of preference, but being willing to hear what was fit without having to like it. And then again, on Vaughn’s little flurry home recently I realised how much I missed being in the same city as him — because we don’t eat together anymore. V forces me to slow down, to pay attention to different components of what I was tasting, to track the changing taste of the same cup of coffee over time. (Vaughn says you should eat everything happily, even quite mediocre food. Only food snobs carp on and on about things. But it’s quite another thing to not know that what you are eating is mediocre when it is, and I never know.) But it comes to the same thing, really: developing one’s own taste begins with this willing subjugation of judgment to those with superior taste.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird