Stylish, heartfelt Stevenson

Stevenson's tomb on Mount Vaea, Western Samoa

Clip from a gorgeous letter by Robert Louis Stevenson: Lastly we come to those vocations which are at once decisive and precise; to the men who are born with the love of pigments, the passion of drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse to create with words, just as other and perhaps the same men are born with the love of hunting, or the sea, or horses, or the turning-lathe. These are predestined; if a man love the labour of any trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him. He may have the general vocation too: he may have a taste for all the arts, and I think he often has; but the mark of his calling is this laborious partiality for one, this inextinguishable zest in its technical successes, and (perhaps above all) a certain candour of mind to take his very trifling enterprise with a gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and to think the smallest improvement worth accomplishing at any expense of time and industry. The book, the statue, the sonata, must be gone upon with the unreasoning good faith and the unflagging spirit of children at their play. IS IT WORTH DOING?—when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that question, it is implicitly answered in the negative. It does not occur to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-room sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the candour of the one and the ardour of the other should be united in the bosom of the artist. Read the rest HERE.

CHOIR

Yolanda Sharpe, Pear and Apple, 2007
pen and ink, colored pencil and acrylic painted paper, 15 by 15 by 15 inches

Some time ago I agreed to join a choir, my arm having been twisted into strange configurations by an otherwise quite gentle and pleasant choirmistress. I had friends in the choir—my painter friend Yolanda Sharpe, who has appeared on this blog and The Lydian Stones, and who has a marvelous voice and does recitals, and many others. But right away I discovered that a choir is such a mixture of many parts--apples and oranges and pears and pomellos jumbled together.  We have such an unusual number of pronounced eccentrics (a conventionally polite word for lunatics) in our choir that I have threatened to write a revelatory comic novel called CHOIR.  Each member must be made to blend into a whole: into a kind of family, if you will.

I didn’t particularly want to plunge into the choir, as participation demanded a lesson once a week, practices twice a week, and performance once and occasionally twice a week. Then there are unexpected things called choir festivals and sundry other stray performances. That’s a lot to add onto the heaped plate of a mother of three who has many village activities and also just happens to be an obsessed writer. I did not know how to read music, though I was perfectly capable of bumping along if given the first note. Luckily I was a soprano, which struck me as far easier than being in any of the other sections.

Since then I have discovered something that lots of people know who are not obsessed artists of some sort, bound to a vocation.  I have found out that it is a pleasure to add some focus and discipline to one’s natural feeling for an art that one is no expert in. Likewise, it is enjoyable to learn something new; at the moment, I am grasping intervals and doing much better with duration of notes and rests.  These things remind me of poetry, and I certainly aspire to song there.

Each of the arts is a fertile sea in which strange, beautiful beings may be found—some immensely great, others quite invisible to the naked eye. Without the sea of culture and its innumerable small creatures, no great one could survive.