If fine art finds some people as oblivious as Martians then maybe that’s from people turning away from two sorts of time. I sympathize.
There is the time needed to learn: Training the eye and heart to appreciate the best. Which is nice to do, but who has the time for learning to enjoy fine art? When it comes to man-hours required, I would think the learning curve is much easier for coming to appreciate popular culture or professional sports.
Some examples of sports appreciation: Being able to tell in advance while the athlete is still in motion that his penalty shot will miss; learning to tell when a team is fast, slow or frazzled; and realizing when a superstar has changed all the players just by entering the game…
There is the time needed to deeply enjoy: Novelist Jeanette Winterson went from the shock of one day walking along and seeing art as she passed a window… to “getting into” art… and then, finally, to spending her afternoon at a gallery soaking in just two pieces.
I have a picture at home, my first of several from the Stephen Lowe gallery. Someone cried while absorbed in the painting. It shows the gallery owner’s very young mother, (whom I have met, as she came here from Victoria to see a visiting artist) in patched poverty, walking all alone in her misfortune, in a wind to be endured in silence. The piece is titled Wind Blows Ten Thousand Strands; it rewards time spent gazing.
Time applies to literature, too. Winterson points out that literature may sound so much better over the radio than when we read it, because the speaker has to slow down to the originally intended speed. In our age of newspapers and screens, she says, we may use a speeded-up pace for our reading. If so, then I think we get the “words and facts” but not the feelings, not the music. To quote my T-shirt, “If you skim, you’re dim.”
Here’s a War of the Worlds poem, with a narrator who still has bouts of survivor guilt. I’ll try not to read my own poem too fast.
Long After the Martians Were Gone
We have learned the Martians had polarities but no switches, no junctions.
Martians are cold, without a soul.
I have liked switches that clack, and ones that click.
Knife switches, rocker switches and fuse box spring switches.
Long after the Martians were gone,
I walked in the concrete futuristic Capital City.
I saw grey terraces, cantilevered office blocks,
spacious atriums, plate glass walls, high ceilings,
balconies opening into vast wells,
and corridors that angled and sloped up opening onto new vistas,
while I couldn’t help feeling a half smile.
Next year I returned to Capital City,
my shoulders carrying survivor guilt,
life guilt and the “I should’s,”
walking stooped past dull grey expanses,
with my mouth a straight line, lungs half deflated.
But then I heard music,
and I switched.
Walking in gratitude my heart became a generator.
My eyes lit up, my lungs pumped up,
my shoulders forgot any load.
I was so grateful to be walking in Capital City.
Sean Crawford
In sight of the Rocky Mountains
September
2020
Footnote:
To my surprise, other readers on a jet plane bring books, plural. Now I know why they need an E-book reader. Not me, I only bring but one precious volume. When next I fly over Greenland to London I will have Jeanette Winterson’s book Art Objects subtitled Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. … Update: I did, sans Greenland, as I flew to Toronto first, then over the Atlantic.
