The first time I recognized appreciation as something more than drooling peach juice down the front of my shirt, I was reading Bradbury and felt an echo of my own mind as if a breeze had rustled the edges of a curtain. It seemed to cast a glint in the drab chatter that was growing on my world’s boundaries. It was also private, very private. I began to experience the unhinging of secrets that seemed as if I alone had discovered. Of course the impulse to make everyone else understand raged in my youthful veins as if a dam had broken. I was discovering tools that pried at horizons, filtered hums, helped to cull through the-way-things-are. I discovered how to discern with more than the exclamation of what I refuted. When young, most of our definitions are derived from the opposites, the colors we do not like, the music, rules and patterns we name dull, the authorities we belittle, the struggle between independence and being included.
I was once enthralled by the tag line printed on the sides of cement trucks, “Find a need and fill it.” The cleverness seemed indicative of a mind I wanted to emulate, until time abraded the facets of appreciation and a change in what I appreciated struck out in search of itself. Each crack of the door extended appreciation as a light finding the crevices. Like dominoes, I followed Maugham’s Phillip Carey to Hardy’s Tess, Pound’s Metro to Sunday’s with Stevens. But the door doesn’t close and Dr Seuss plays with Silverstein and Mother Goose; their blocks aren’t put away for the night. What transpires as differences of what we appreciate are welcomed as new melodies, new maps, angles for the sextant of likes and dislikes to navigate the worlds we’ve never explored.
Taste changes with the values that culture designs for the seasons. A storm enacts a whole tenderness that artists flock to soothe and the shifts in values are first played out on the stages, the theaters. We try them on and prance a bit, measure the outrage in dollars spent by the rebellious in our midst, redefining the scopes of appreciation.
It seems we need to be suspicious of what we appreciate, diligent in gathering views from the postcards of anyone “wishing you were here.” Otherwise, we risk creativity to the goblins of the popular and today this includes anything remotely pretending to be experimental. We run from the popular at a pace that lands us in its lap. The internet affords the new the luxury of obscurity for about fifteen minutes, and pow, you have a following. It seems that now, as never before, the scope of appreciation must be twisted into focus at every opportunity. We must suspect our likes and dislikes and explore creatively those things pulling at our poles, pulling at what makes us comfortable, not from the aspects of doing, but within the disciplines of appreciation. It is easy to put one’s appreciation at risk by settling for things that are like us as well as liked by us. As I discovered in the breeze rustling the curtains from my days with Bradbury, the world is bigger than that.
April 27, 2011 at 10:03AM