One interesting thing is that Jordan Peterson was born very close to where I was born in northern Alberta, Canada--twenty or thirty miles apart, which up there is like being next door neighbors.
The role of aesthetics in my life is so important that I think of it as what I fled to, trying to escape the stifling environment I was born into. I say stifling because, even though it was wide open nature, to someone with an intellectual bent, it was like being in one of those tanks where you float without sensation--no sounds, no light. One place we lived when I was young, was so far north it was taiga with permafrost, meaning that you could dig down in the ground at the end of August and, about ten or twelve feet down, the ground would still be frozen. The summer wasn't long enough for more than just the surface to thaw out. This was when I was five or six years old and, honestly, the only thing I could find to play with was moss.
The landscape was basically small, stunted trees and moss: frozen in the winter and soggy in the brief summer. You might say, gee, go to the store and buy a toy. Ah, no stores, not within a two or three hour drive at least. Well, wait, there was a Hudson's Bay trading post where if you took in some mink or beaver skins they would trade you flour and sugar. Yes, it must have been one of the last. There was a Department of Defence radar base in the neighborhood, and a tribe of Indigenous People, but that, literally, was it. My father ran a small rail terminal that served the DOD base.
You have to recall that this was before the internet. Indeed, in this place, not only was there no internet, there was also no television, no radio, no newspapers, no bookstores (no stores of any kind). The only place I have ever been that was more desolate was northern Vancouver Island when I worked as a tree-planter and while in one place there was not even a building, there was always the beauty of nature.
The first time I was in a place that had a library big enough to have books with aesthetic content I fell in love with Japanese art, specifically ukiyo-e:
Some of these, and some Chinese landscapes, looked a great deal like the landscapes of northern Vancouver Island.
To me, this art and music when I discovered it, offered what seemed to be the only door out of a drear and narrow life. I think this is the role of art: to beckon, to widen, to draw us out of the narrowness of our lives.
But in some ways, I regard my early life as being of immense benefit because it was free of the false appeal of the Internet, social, and mass media of today. It is hard to imagine what it is like for a child now. Instead of just some moss to play with, he has an iPad, with access to literally everything in the world. But 99% of what he sees is cacophonous drivel. Instead of silence and distance, the experience is of a million hucksters and a million diversions that may very well mean almost nothing. That's enough to make you long for a little moss! (By the way, after collecting different varieties of moss, I would take them home and install them into a large glass bowl, creating a little terrarium.)
But back to art: the benefits of real art in anyone's life are enormous. Even if you have little sensitivity to art you can still derive tranquillity and perhaps a bit of perspective from it. With more acquaintance it can give you access to a thousand worlds, a million points of view. But remember, real art always has a price of admission: you have to learn the context, the methods, the history, before you can understand and appreciate most artworks.
Well, enough preaching for today. Let's listen to some music by Toru Takemitsu, Folios, for guitar (that I played at Wigmore Hall in London at my debut concert there). It ends with a quotation from a chorale from Bach's St. Matthew Passion.
6 comments:
Apropos of this, I have seen more recent comments about the 90s being a halcyon time. I'm not saying they were in actuality but the relative absence of the internet and social media may make it seem so. I do think that observation will become more common as it is still in the lived experience or anyone over 30.
Gee, Bryan, your opening paragraphs about your early life in N. Alberta made me wonder if I was a soft "City Kid", and I was born in Cold Lake. 200 miles (it was long before Canada went metric) NE of Edmonton accessed on a dirt road that was gumbo when it rained. As kids, we thought it was the Big Time to go shopping in Bonnyville! Nine of my first 12 years were spent in Cold Lake thanks to the RCAF. The other 3 were in Chatham NB within the aroma zone of the Mirimichi River pulp mills.
Isn't Canada wonderful once you get outside the 100 mile strip north of the 49th parallel and the GTA?
Like me, you would have enjoyed (almost) midnight sun in the summer and next to none in the winter. I remember walking to and from school on -40 F days in the dark with only a narrow gap to look through between the scarves tied around my forehead and my neck.
Thanks for the memories. And thanks for the aesthetic focus.
Of course we had media (and it was social to us). We listened to Hockey games on our old tube radio, cheering of course for Montreal, because there were no Oilers or Flames.
After reading your comments I am glad I shared some personal memories--because they were just a bit universal after all! Right, Cold Lake. Same neighborhood. We lived in a place called Anzac and it was in the 1950s. Tough country up there. Remember that scene in Gallipoli when the two young men, on their way to sign up to go fight the Kaiser in WWI, run into an old Australian miner in the outback, the middle of absolute nowhere? And he asks them where they are going and they say to fight to protect their nation, to make sure the Kaiser doesn't come here and take away our country? And the old guy looks around at the desolate desert and says, "if you ask me, he's welcome to it!"
Speaking of aesthetics & moss, how about the aesthetics OF moss? I have a bookstore roaming friend who has a genetically ordained gift for finding the coolest books in any genre, any time, place, e.g., ship building, 1st edition novels, gold mining in northern CA (with maps), monasteries of southern France, numismatics, US Patent entries (illustrated fold-outs), weaving patterns of Guatemalan central highlands (with pictures) and more. At a Seattle 'Friends of the Library' sales (spring and fall), his hand hovers over a pile of 19th century castaways (Thackery in 500 volumes, et al.) and pulls out "Moss," a thin book featuring dozens of colored plates of different kinds of moss. The examples were somewhat blown up, say, 2" x 2" so you could distinguish their wonderful variety; the shades of green also varied and wonderfully rendered. I had to be content with my 3rd edition of Coleridge's 'Table Talk', 1853 ...
Wow, what an embarassement de richesse! We have library sales here every Thursday, but good finds are pretty rare. Ah, Thackery! I actually read all of Trollope's Palliser novels once.
Yes, there is an amazing variety of moss, some of which looks like a tiny, tiny forest.
p.s. When economist John Kenneth Galbraith was asked: (I can't remember the exact phrasing of the question) "What would you do differently, starting out today?" (or 'How would you prepare for a career in politics and economics?')
Galbraith said, "Re-read the Pallisers."
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