Projecting Synapses into the Otherwise Chaos

The other evening I went out to a local bar to hear my friends Nikki Allen and Renee Alberts read poetry between bands. As always, and despite the ubiquitous conversations throughout their sets, I was deeply impressed by these ladies' words, though I couldn't tell you exactly why. When I got home, Sophie asked me about the reading, and if I could offer anything in the way of critique, to which I replied that without a text in front of me, and even then, sometimes poetry really escapes me. To be honest, I have not read very much poetry, certainly more than the majority of Americans, but only enough to know just how little I know about it. Give me a novel any day. This became a rather interesting discussion on the authority of critique, and Sophie suggested that it might apply to any art: she likes music, but there are a much broader range of bands I appreciate, because being a musician myself I know the skill/ technique/ references/ etc. that go in to making songs. Sophie was trained in dance, but despite a vague understanding of the human body through doing yoga for years I could not be able to tell you anything about a dance performance. Personally I think this situation is most clear when you look at an activity such as juggling. When you see someone juggling five flaming clubs you think, that is amazing, and it is. If you happen to have learned how to juggle three balls, the feat of flaming clubs is even more amazing, and perhaps to some it even seems impossible, because you know just how preposterously hard it is to juggle anything. But the more you learn the more you are able to start talking about someone's techniques, and perhaps learn some of them yourself.

Of course, this isn't to say that offering critique is an inclusive thing, that one has to be initiated into that secret club of poetry, music, juggling, in order to understand and talk about what is going on. As baffling as art is for some people it is not stage magic (and even that one can learn). All one has to do is to read closely, to listen or watch, to frame an argument. But this is also not to say that there aren't some people, from having read a lot and listened for a long time, that actually do have authority in their particular field. Whether unfortunately or not, to paraphrase Orwell: though all perspectives are interesting, some perspectives are more interesting than others. Especially since there is an oh so fine line between perspective and opinion, and we can bring nothing with us to a reading outside of our own store of assumptions and references. It would seem then that if one wanted to offer an interesting, or at least articulate, perspective, one should attempt to become informed in a wide variety of cultural activities and perspectives. Either that or play the fool, and say the most asinine, obtuse things that somehow strive towards profundity.