Unrecognized beauty and its implications

My friend Amanda Witt highlighted this excellent Washington Post story about what happens when world-class violinist Joshua Bell abandons his customary concert-hall digs for an hour "undercover" as a busker at a metro station in Washington, D.C. during the morning commute.

Would it surprise you to learn that few of the people rushing by stopped to listen?

The moral of the story is that context matters: "unframed art" is oft unnoticed, as well.

Radio commentator Paul Harvey once spoke of a man who played first trumpet in the New York Philharmonic and moonlighted with the Salvation Army for streetcorner performances at Christmas time. I suspect the trumpeter's experience was similar to Mr. Bell's, with few passers-by pausing to enjoy the talent they were hearing.

Would you indulge me an attempt to link these musical stories to Differences in Worldview, another favorite hobby horse that often takes win, place, or show in races around the Paragraph Farm?

Amanda found the WaPo essay through Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost. Revisiting Carter's blog, I got the impression that Joe needed an interesting feature to lighten his mood after having been frustrated by obstinate ignorance in some corners of the blogosphere. Just before commending the Joshua Bell piece, Joe had had a few choice words to say about the pointlessness of a blog swarm against theocracy. This is because any such blog swarm is silly, and not, I hasten to add, because the United States already has a theocracy-- this country is not theocratic. We're a long way from the Puritans, as Joe and others keep pointing out, and as I observed in the pages of the now-defunct New Pantagruel at this time last year.

Still, there's no pleasing some critics. People who fear theocracy (that indictment would include well-known pundits like Andrew Sullivan and Sam "religious liberals provide cover for extremists" Harris) are charter members of the "dog ate my homework" school of public discourse.

Look not at their job histories: look at their pronouncements. Joe described these fear-mongers with a metaphor from Superman lore, saying that "for the radical fringe of the secular left--the Chomskyites, the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, Rosie O'Donnell--reason and logic are like kryptonite. Because they live on emotion, what they feel is what is true, regardless of facts and reality."

Assume for the sake of argument that Joe is right about "theophobes," as I think he is. Look again at what Joe says is the root of the problem with the secular left, which is its apparent emphasis on feeling above all else. From such a worldview, we get peculiar readings of America's founding documents that insist, for example, on an alleged right to go through life without being offended (no mean feat in a world where offense is synonymous with any kind of challenge). The same people who insist that "it takes a village" to raise a child don't see the dissonance between that and the refrain of Cain with which they avoid pain ("Am I my brother's keeper?").

Are you wondering what this has to do with musicians whose playing gives journalists permission to write about beauty?

On the old theory that there is nothing creative about evil, and that anything evil is a perversion of an original good, I'd like to suggest that it is debased to follow your heart in all things, not simply because passion can be untrustworthy, but also because unswerving fealty to feelings puts a lot of needless wear and tear on your heart, which makes it harder to follow your heart (sometimes rendered "follow your bliss") at those times when you actually should.

All of film noir depends on that insight in one way or another, but here's an anecdote from the Post piece that echoes the point I'm trying to get at. The writer interviewed a man named Tindley, who works in a bakery a few feet from where Bell spent part of a weekday morning concertizing:

...every minute or so, as though drawn by something not entirely within his control, Tindley would walk to the very edge of the Au Bon Pain property, keeping his toes inside the line, still on the job. Then he'd lean forward, as far out into the hallway as he could, watching the fiddler on the other side of the glass doors. The foot traffic was steady, so the doors were usually open. The sound came through pretty well.

"You could tell in one second that this guy was good, that he was clearly a professional," Tindley says. He plays the guitar, loves the sound of strings, and has no respect for a certain kind of musician.

"Most people, they play music; they don't feel it," Tindley says. "Well, that man was feeling it. That man was moving. Moving into the sound."

Darn right he was. Mr. Tindley did not know of Joshua Bell or his reputation as one of the world's great young violinists, but he recognized Bell's talent, and the way it gave him a window into the soul of both the music and the musician. This was feeling at its best: raw, perhaps, but not a barbaric yawp of the kind that Robin Williams' Whitman-channelling English teacher extolled in the movie Dead Poets Society, to the eventual undoing of one of his more impressionable students. What Bell had, and Tindley noticed, was feeling in masterful service to composition, feeling mediated through technique born of long practice, so that a young man with a Stradivarius in his hand could reach back in time to bring Johann Sebastian Bach to the steps of a franchise bakery counter in the capital of the United States some 257 years after he passed on to glory. This was, in other words (with a hat tip to late Boston front man Brad Delp), "More than a Feeling."

Joshua Bell himself seems aware of the important distinction here. When the newspaper approached him about doing what amounts to a musical stunt, he readily agreed, on the condition that WaPo writers shelve the word "genius" in descriptions of his playing. Bell is very, very good at what he does, and he knows it. But he evidently also knows that the definition of musical genius changes with time. In these feelings-driven days, almost anything sublime gets tagged as genius. Bell rejects that label because, he says, his own gifts are "primarily interpretive." He prudently reserves the genius tag for certain composers who could also play the dickens out of their chosen instruments. One thinks of Mozart and Bach, although WaPo staff writer Gene Weingarten did not press Bell on this point. (Perhaps by design, the same newspaper also featured a story about a "math master" that day).

I'd like to call Bell's attitude the, er, genius of humility, if only to reinforce his point. And the reason it needs reinforcement goes back to that tyranny of feeling that so rightly vexed Joe Carter, when he noticed that people who fear -- feeling word! -- theocracy in America do not do so for rational reasons, but because devout Christians -- and believe you me, it's always Christians -- creep them out. Even if they blog from with earshot of speakers that broadcast an amplified Muslim call to prayer five times a day through the neighborhoods around a mosque in Hamtramck, Michigan, it's a Catholic church bell tolling the Angelus at noon, or a Presbyterian leading a Wednesday night bible study, that scares them. Go figure (and to do that, you'll need your mind, not your feelings).

It's not heartlessness, Stoicism, zealotry, fascism, or Zen Buddhist detachment that I'm calling for, still less any Naziesque "Triumph of the Will;" it's context: the frame manifestly foreign to so many self-proclaimed champions of the gray area, without which even great art would otherwise go unnoticed, like a world-class violinist in street clothes at a commuter rail station. Context requires a certain detachment, which in turn is impossible unless feelings have been disciplined enough to detach.

Sadly, those who make a god of unfettered expression tend to mistake technique for constraint. They think of themselves as free, often on seemingly rational grounds ("who's it hurt? this is my truth"), when in fact they're slaves to their own passions. Novelist Terry Pratchett diagnosed the progressive approach perfectly in one of his Discworld stories, and I'm just fundamentalist enough to agree with the character in Carpe Jugulum who declares in true counter-cultural fashion that there are no grays, "only white that's got grubby."

In some ways, what I"m saying inverts the arguments implicit in The Cricket in Times Square and Charlotte's Web, both of which depend on transposing something familiar into unexpected places, and then having it appreciated in its new surroundings. Were that a common phenomenon, George Selden and E.B. White would not have been able to use it to memorable advantage in their classic children's books, Shusaku Endo could not have written movingly of the difficulties of Japanese Christianity in Silence, Gary Larson's Far Side comic strip would not have been as funny, and Joshua Bell would have made more than lunch money in tips.