At the Matinée

Having taken his sister-in-law to her seat, he installed himself by a column and resolved to listen as closely and conscientiously as possible. He tried not to get distracted and spoil his impression by looking at the arm-waving of the white-tied conductor…or at the ladies in hats…or at all the faces. He tried to avoid meeting musical connoisseurs and talkers, and stood with lowered eyes, listening.
— L.T.

You never step in the same river twice, as the old cliché goes, and you never pour tea into your favorite cup, or glance at a favorite vase that's been on your bookshelf the last fifteen years, and see exactly the same thing. That is the most reliable measure of art — that a well-loved vase, or song, or novel, is ever-changing, that it reveals itself to you slowly over years, that you never make up your mind about it and as it gets old, or you get old, its shifting current is more and more to be trusted.

I started re-reading a thick old book this summer, hoping to step into a favorite river another time after a dry spell in reading — I needed a good book. A really good book (I said this to myself a little guiltily, knowing if I were a better reader I would read something current instead of an old classic) always feels new no matter how many times it is read.

Last week I got to page 686 of this favorite old book, I am sure it is one you have probably read, and on this page the main character sets out on a busy day of errands he is supposed to run around Moscow. His day begins early — around eleven — and he has much to do. He'll visit a professor he knows, hoping for an introduction to an economist who may help with the book about farming he's trying to write. His manuscript is critical of efforts to modernize farming in his big country, and so far nobody wants to read it. He'll call on a state official who may help his sister with her legal trouble. A stop at the bank, and then he’ll pick up his sister-in-law & go to the matinée. New orchestral works — the main character takes a dim view of the ‘new style’ of composition.

Finally after ten or fifteen pages the main character arrives at the matinée & starts listening, lowering his eyes, & not surprisingly he does not like the music. It is modern, chaotic, emotional.. He is perplexed and fatigued. At the intermission he runs into someone he knows, and — doesn't this always happen at a bad concert — the friend he meets raves about the work, it is fantastic, it is particularly graphic and sculptural and rich in color. The main character feels isolated. The two get in an argument.

Suddenly as I'm reading, I feel myself stepping back, almost, into the same old river from before — my bare feet in the current feel a stone they remember. This brief fleeting Moscow concert scene and this argument about music — I remember this from reading this book back in my twenties. The author, I realized then, was registering a complaint about art, and by way of the little argument between two friends an idea is put forward I've been wondering about through the intervening decades. The main character, burdened, perplexed, isolated (just set aside for a moment the fact that he spends most of the thousand pages of the book feeling this way) by the new Wagnerian music he's being subjected to at the matinée, says to his friend well, the problem here is that this music is crossing over into the sphere of another art. Rather than just being pure music, it is trying for narrative — trying to make you see characters and follow the twisting plot of a play it’s all supposed to correspond to.

Ah, no, says the main character's friend. All art is one, and it reaches higher by uniting all its forms.

There — that is the familiar stone, the idea I remember & have been thinking about for the intervening decades. Is it 'wrong' for one art to delve into the sphere of another? For a photograph to try & tell a story, for a poem to sound like jazz? Crazy, but back then I was on the main character's side. Yes, I thought. Good art sticks to what it knows and does only what it is good at. It's an old-fashioned idea, of course, that the various 'arts', poetry, music, sculpture, each have their expertise — each have something separate they know how to do.

Naturally, as a potter I like this idea, that there is a unique kind of beauty that only clay can attain, and that's what it should do — try for that beauty, not the beauty you find in a poem or a landscape painting. A formal and antique idea, like thinking you have to learn Latin to write well, and based on the idea that art is largely craft — being good at it means learning to be an expert at something very specific & fairly material. Of course this idea was obliterated by Modernism, arriving less than fifty years after the book we're talking about was written.

Still. This time around, I'm still on the main character's side. In his argument during the intermission his friend says well, look, didn’t you read your program? You need to read that first to understand this music! I laughed when I read that.

This year, re-reading this well-loved book, stepping in the same river a second time, looking back, as I always seem to do as a potter, I’ve also started looking around at some of the old pots around my house — a well-loved teacup, a vase that’s been on a shelf for a couple decades. Hmm, I think. I’m still getting to know them, and they keep changing, every time I stop to really look — they are revealing themselves slowly, over time.

By the way these photos, above, are not of my own work — I am grateful to a Tuesday wheel class student, an antiques expert, who brings pieces from his collection in for us to discuss & study. We talk eagerly at the start of every Tuesday class, passing pieces around, some of them, like these, hundreds of years old — we learn about our own work this way, the next pots we are about to make…by looking back at well-loved pieces from before.