I have been spending the past few days sipping a series of subjects, none of which are remotely coherent. Perhaps this is the treatise that unemployment offers a person– time…to tread lightly and linger over random thoughts that materialise in the brain barring rhyme or reason. And even though I have only this month to savour the feeling before I get ‘back to work’, the languid pace is refreshing. For the first time in five years, I have the time to read again, the way I used to…uninterrupted.
Of late I have given a lot of thought to the lives of ‘other people’, random strangers moving at their frenzied pace and what it is that defines each of them. This is the kind of random thinking which usually leads to definitive dead ends and takes a hell of a long time getting there, still...it helped me put the proverbial panacea to a problem I have faced for as long as I can remember.
Time is a troubling notion and trying to navigate ones way through its loopholes is even trickier.
I have been reading William Hazlitt’s ‘The pleasures of Hating’ and one of his essay’s ‘The Indian Jugglers’ provides the key to open a door for a question I had long forgotten asking. I cannot count the number of times I have wished for enough time to pursue each idle, speculative, random, abstract thought that occurs to me to some manner of conclusion. To ‘run with it’ towards a definitive end. Hazlitt’s story tells of a local fair side-show, Indian juggler with the ability to juggle - in perfect precision and time - four golden balls for hours on end … seemingly without effort. The jugglers’ life is of little consequence, as are the minutiae of his daily habits: the time he wakes up in the morning, his favourite food or even his name, because his moments of glory are spent juggling. The perfection of his craft is his realisation. This man is at his best and his most complete performing the one task which only he can do.
Some might consider this a trifle: the ability to juggle over everything else one ‘could’ do, but then again, to do something, anything, better than anyone else in the world is no small feat. It brings to mind the age-old question: is it really better to be the jack of all trades than the master of one? Does the ability to do many things fairly well win over one overwhelming outstanding gift?
For the first time I am not so sure, I have always enjoyed the fact that I relish several artistic pursuits. Writing, reading, painting, music…but I couldn’t -for the life of me- pick one over the other. Is this what being a well-rounded individual truly means, to expand your vision but not your vocabulary? To broaden your horizons without perfecting any one of them? And who is to say that a pianist, doesn’t feel complete being just one thing…a maestro. And what about the mediocre pianists who spend just as much time practicing- if not more- but still miss out on 'everything else'? I do not know if I am safer or sorrier for the fact that I tend to enjoy ‘walking’ around life rather than jumping in and swimming its depths. Taking one task and exploring it to its fullest before moving on to the next, rather than flitting back and forth between dozens in the interest of ‘seeing all that I can’.
What is the point of seeing the bigger picture, when the details escape your vision?
I never really could decide how I felt about the extraordinary humans that live among us, I used to think that while I admired them I did not envy them their gifts. One gives up a lot to be ‘perfect’ at something…it is so much easier to be fairly decent at it and pick up a handful of other nuggets along the way to wherever it is we are headed. Then again this could just be fear rearing its ugly head for the umpteenth time. I think to myself, is there no one thing in which I can challenge others and claim to exact perfection. Even though the spirit of competition -or ambition for that matter- has been distinctly absent in most of my person for most of my life.
People tell you it is enough to ‘be yourself’…as if that is supposed to be helpful, some trite manner of consolation. “The mechanical performer undertakes to emulate himself, not to equal another,” Hazlitt says, but then let that performer not care about the skills of other performers emulating him…that is the tricky part. The ‘self’ is nearly impossible to define…is it our opinions, our innate habits, our pet peeves or our preferences? Or is it the projection of every one else’s definitions that we ingrain in our public persona? It is our innate assumption that we ‘could do’ something should we choose to do it, that often stops us from trying. Either that or the need to make it seem trivial and unworthy of our time and labour that keeps us from choosing to do anything at all. Is it easy to dance on a tightrope: let anyone who thinks so get up and try, this is the point where they would inevitably call it a foolish exercise to begin with.
Here in comes the question of ‘greatness’, all of us wish to be remembered after we are gone for our perceived greatness, but there are few willing to go the lengths required to cement, in the minds of others, that one memory which we will not even be here to savour should we be able to leave it behind. Themistocles said that he could not play the flute but that he could make a small city a great one. He did, and that gives one a good idea of the distinction in question. However, one might still say that Themistocles’s Everest remained the flute and that its all relative.
Browning’s poem Andrea del Sarto speaks of the Florentine painter who was so flawless he was forgotten amidst more passionate and less ‘perfect’ contemporaries such as Raphael and Da Vici. Sarto’s failing was perfection, he was dubbed "Andrea senza errori" (Andrea the perfect) and got little recognition during or after his lifetime, even though Raphael himself admitted that his work was far superior to anything he had ever seen or painted himself. Sarto lacked humanity, his images resembled photographs - there was no single error in stroke or stain. Further, Sarto’s life tells of how he lacked the determination and passion that his contemporaries had, he was perfect to begin with and had little ambition to carve his name into the future and even less care to better his work to compete with everyone else. He was content. Perfectly reconciled to live through his life by continuing his work at its languid, perfect pace and has been criticized, by many, for having “a taste for life that precluded him from glory”.
There are few willing to take into consideration the fact that from his perspective, Sarto got the best end of the bargain.
Of late I have given a lot of thought to the lives of ‘other people’, random strangers moving at their frenzied pace and what it is that defines each of them. This is the kind of random thinking which usually leads to definitive dead ends and takes a hell of a long time getting there, still...it helped me put the proverbial panacea to a problem I have faced for as long as I can remember.
Time is a troubling notion and trying to navigate ones way through its loopholes is even trickier.
I have been reading William Hazlitt’s ‘The pleasures of Hating’ and one of his essay’s ‘The Indian Jugglers’ provides the key to open a door for a question I had long forgotten asking. I cannot count the number of times I have wished for enough time to pursue each idle, speculative, random, abstract thought that occurs to me to some manner of conclusion. To ‘run with it’ towards a definitive end. Hazlitt’s story tells of a local fair side-show, Indian juggler with the ability to juggle - in perfect precision and time - four golden balls for hours on end … seemingly without effort. The jugglers’ life is of little consequence, as are the minutiae of his daily habits: the time he wakes up in the morning, his favourite food or even his name, because his moments of glory are spent juggling. The perfection of his craft is his realisation. This man is at his best and his most complete performing the one task which only he can do.
Some might consider this a trifle: the ability to juggle over everything else one ‘could’ do, but then again, to do something, anything, better than anyone else in the world is no small feat. It brings to mind the age-old question: is it really better to be the jack of all trades than the master of one? Does the ability to do many things fairly well win over one overwhelming outstanding gift?
For the first time I am not so sure, I have always enjoyed the fact that I relish several artistic pursuits. Writing, reading, painting, music…but I couldn’t -for the life of me- pick one over the other. Is this what being a well-rounded individual truly means, to expand your vision but not your vocabulary? To broaden your horizons without perfecting any one of them? And who is to say that a pianist, doesn’t feel complete being just one thing…a maestro. And what about the mediocre pianists who spend just as much time practicing- if not more- but still miss out on 'everything else'? I do not know if I am safer or sorrier for the fact that I tend to enjoy ‘walking’ around life rather than jumping in and swimming its depths. Taking one task and exploring it to its fullest before moving on to the next, rather than flitting back and forth between dozens in the interest of ‘seeing all that I can’.
What is the point of seeing the bigger picture, when the details escape your vision?
I never really could decide how I felt about the extraordinary humans that live among us, I used to think that while I admired them I did not envy them their gifts. One gives up a lot to be ‘perfect’ at something…it is so much easier to be fairly decent at it and pick up a handful of other nuggets along the way to wherever it is we are headed. Then again this could just be fear rearing its ugly head for the umpteenth time. I think to myself, is there no one thing in which I can challenge others and claim to exact perfection. Even though the spirit of competition -or ambition for that matter- has been distinctly absent in most of my person for most of my life.
People tell you it is enough to ‘be yourself’…as if that is supposed to be helpful, some trite manner of consolation. “The mechanical performer undertakes to emulate himself, not to equal another,” Hazlitt says, but then let that performer not care about the skills of other performers emulating him…that is the tricky part. The ‘self’ is nearly impossible to define…is it our opinions, our innate habits, our pet peeves or our preferences? Or is it the projection of every one else’s definitions that we ingrain in our public persona? It is our innate assumption that we ‘could do’ something should we choose to do it, that often stops us from trying. Either that or the need to make it seem trivial and unworthy of our time and labour that keeps us from choosing to do anything at all. Is it easy to dance on a tightrope: let anyone who thinks so get up and try, this is the point where they would inevitably call it a foolish exercise to begin with.
Here in comes the question of ‘greatness’, all of us wish to be remembered after we are gone for our perceived greatness, but there are few willing to go the lengths required to cement, in the minds of others, that one memory which we will not even be here to savour should we be able to leave it behind. Themistocles said that he could not play the flute but that he could make a small city a great one. He did, and that gives one a good idea of the distinction in question. However, one might still say that Themistocles’s Everest remained the flute and that its all relative.
Browning’s poem Andrea del Sarto speaks of the Florentine painter who was so flawless he was forgotten amidst more passionate and less ‘perfect’ contemporaries such as Raphael and Da Vici. Sarto’s failing was perfection, he was dubbed "Andrea senza errori" (Andrea the perfect) and got little recognition during or after his lifetime, even though Raphael himself admitted that his work was far superior to anything he had ever seen or painted himself. Sarto lacked humanity, his images resembled photographs - there was no single error in stroke or stain. Further, Sarto’s life tells of how he lacked the determination and passion that his contemporaries had, he was perfect to begin with and had little ambition to carve his name into the future and even less care to better his work to compete with everyone else. He was content. Perfectly reconciled to live through his life by continuing his work at its languid, perfect pace and has been criticized, by many, for having “a taste for life that precluded him from glory”.
There are few willing to take into consideration the fact that from his perspective, Sarto got the best end of the bargain.
