Friday, December 23, 2011

Kinds of Art or Craft

I write, I play music, and I make pottery.
A lot of my writing is translation, which is not a creative art, a lot of my music-making is playing the notes that other people have written, which is also, in a way, closer to a craft than to an art, and there's no question that making bowls and cups out of clay is a craft, not an art.
Of course the boundary between art and craft is fuzzy.  Every art has an element of skill, or craft in it, and every craft has an expressive potential.
Writing is abstract.  Sometimes I write with a pen on paper in notebooks, but the writing isn't the words in my handwriting on those specific pieces of paper.  Presumably, some time or other, I might transcribe what I've written by hand, and the writing will be embodied (or disembodied) as electronic code, and then, perhaps, printed on other pieces of paper.
Music making is transitory.  You play something, and it exists for the time that you play it, and in the memory of the people who heard it.
Though of course there is written music, directions to musicians that will enable them to play something, and there is recorded music.  Both of those have something in common with writing, but I still think that the essence of music is unique, live performance.
In contrast to writing (or written or recorded musics), which can be endlessly duplicated and still retain its essence, each piece of pottery is unique, and pottery is solid.  A cup that I made could last for another 6,000 years if it's buried in the right place!
Philosophers of aesthetics strive to figure out what these three forms of expression (along with many others like paintings, photographs, films, plays, or dances) have in common, but their ideas might not matter either to practitioners or to audiences.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

The Thin Line between Tragedy and Joy

Our daughter gave birth twelve minutes into last Monday, after a long, exhausting, and traumatic labor, which nearly ended in a caesarian.  In earlier days of medicine, she would almost certainly have died.
We live in a very narrow zone: the thinness of the earth's crust, the thinness of the atmosphere, the small range of temperatures at which the earth can sustain the forms of life we are familiar with, and the short length of our lives.  On a larger scale, let's not forget the short time that the human species has been present on the face of the earth.
Today I got a traffic ticket for not stopping for a pedestrian in a crosswalk.  I was in the right lane of a four-lane road in downtown Jerusalem, and the pedestrian was hidden from view by the car in the left lane.  I didn't dispute with the policeman who gave me the ticket.  I even told him I was glad they were enforcing the crosswalk law.  Compared to the disaster of injuring a pedestrian, the misfortune of getting a traffic ticket is rather minor.
Only a fraction of a second saved the pedestrian from being hit by my car.  Sometimes we are on the wrong side of that fraction of a second, and we are run over, or we run someone over.
We live in the illusion of stability, that what was is what will be, but life is unstable, and we have no idea what will be.