The Sweetest Pleasures Are The Smallest

Man cannot avoid the small scale. However important the person or the situation we are always living in the small scale. A world leader having a meeting to decide an issue of major international importance is still at any time quite likely to end up thinking "I wonder if I need the loo" or "I'd love a chicken sandwich". Not that there's really any problem with that, it's just raher amusing how much of our lives we spend trying to pretend it isn't true.

I remember sitting at school once when I was about ten on some grey grimy winter morning (much like today) and under the flourescent glare of the strip lights being told that a dot drawn in the middle of a square would be trapped there, locked in two dimensions and unable to find any way out. So we have one more dimension to enjoy than it, but the case remains pretty much the same.

That is why art should reflect the small scale (and by art, I basically mean records, novels, good comedy and some poetry). It's not a duty, more that I can't imagine why anyone creating it would not want to; would not see the frustration and joy of the small scale as the source of their most important personal concerns. After all, our tiny personal dimensions provide us with our biggest emotions - all the love and the hate, the boredom, excitement and tranquility are played out there. In one sense it is pretty much the only scale we have.

Comments

[Tom Steinberg]

This reminds me of the last paragraph of John Kay's excellent The Truth About Markets:

"There is no grand narrative, only little stories. But the need for grand narrative is so firmly ingrained in human thinking that the fruitless search for it will never end."

[Peter]

Agreed. Details make things real (place them somewhere, sometime), and details are emotive. I still remember reading a book when I was ten-ish about an escaped ... mink, I think (ahem). At the end, she's sitting in a burrow, playing with the skulls of the animals she first caught when she escaped, and dying from being kicked by a deer - and the specificity of the skulls made it all seem very real, and had me blubbering like a baby.

Moving between a small but specific detail and a general 'big' issue alwaya works for me too - one of the reasons I love the opening of Joni Mitchell's ...

The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in '68
And he told me all romantics meet the same fate someday
Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe

Makes me think of Larkin's Sad Steps, too; the moon is not a 'lozenge of love' but something to be seen when groping back to bed 'after a piss' (http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar1.htm). Art shouldn't be about trying to ennoble the ordinary by puffing it up; but about relishing the ordinary, because that's where we live.

[max]

Exactly. This is why Jon McGregor's last book 'If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things' is so miraculous. I urge you to read it ...