A list member forwards proof, in the form of a just-written Globe and
Mail column, that we earthlings are all interconnected via an ether of
consciousness:
When it comes to art, first-person's not second-rate
By David MacFarlane
Monday, February 11, 2002 -- Globe and Mail Print Edition, Page R1
I sometimes get letters, don't I just, about the frequency with which I
use "I" in these columns that I write. One reader actually went to the
trouble of writing a poem that counted the number of times I appeared in
one particular column -- counted I's a little more rigorously than
iambs, I might say. But then, I would say, wouldn't I? I just can't
resist butting in, can I?
These readers would prefer it if I made myself scarce, and left more
room around here for he, she, they or it. Those persons are more
reliable than this person, apparently. The assumption of these readers
is that I am just a little too easy for me to get hold of (would that it
were so), and that were I half a journalist (which I'm not), I'd work
the phones and cover the waterfront and ask the experts and meet in
underground parking lots with informed sources and report my findings to
you. If I go to a concert, or an opera, or a play or a movie, they want
to know about "it," not about what "it" did to "me." And they are just
as impatient with any first-person pluralizing. They dislike we as much
as they dislike I. So much as a hint that I have a wife, or children or
friends, and that every now and then we go out to something together,
and I get letters and e-mails asking why I think what "we" do should be
of any interest to "you."
Well, the truth is, I don't. I don't have a clue why anything should or
shouldn't be of interest to you. You are, you might as well know, a
mystery to me. These columns are largely shots in the dark, and they
wouldn't be any less-so were one to try to tie oneself in knots in order
to keep oneself out of them. If you want an omniscient narrator, you
could try the Bible. Either that, or you could read the Aspers'
editorials. I think they come just after Genesis.
And furthermore: if this column of mine has an ongoing premise -- and
you are perfectly within your second-person rights to be not in the
least convinced that it does -- that premise would be that those things
I clumsily lump together under the heading "The Arts" are not separate
from what I might also just as clumsily call my everyday life. A movie,
such as the startling new Japanese anime, Metropolis, or a concert, such
as Via Salzburg's recent evening at the Glenn Gould Theatre of music for
cello and violin, featuring the extraordinary Steven Isserlis and Mayumi
Seiler, or the Down from the Mountain homage to American bluegrass that
pulled into Toronto's Air Canada Centre the other night are not, in my
admittedly first-person opinion, discrete entities. They are not lone,
distant moons to which only expert opinion should be dispatched in order
to send word back to us down here on planet workaday. They do not exist
in order to be pronounced upon by critical opinion.
Not that I have anything against critical opinion. I have the greatest
respect for informed, knowledgeable, uncompromising and imaginative
critics. It's just that the arts exist for critics no more than cars
exist for mechanics. The amazing animation of Metropolis, or Ralph
Stanley's haunting a cappella rendition of O Death, or Steven Isserlis's
brilliant performance of the Benjamin Britten Suite No. 3 should be (so
I think) as much a part of our ongoing conversation about everyday life
as our trips to the corner store for milk, or our dinners with our
families or our triumphs and disasters at work. They should wrap around
our first-persons without a second thought. That's what art is for....