“Minnesota” and the Place of Art

27 April 2022

In SMART Recovery, where most of the readers of this blog come from, one of the components of building a balanced life is developing strong interests in areas that appeal, particularly to you.  One of the resources that has sustained me since childhood is music.  As the two-year anniversary of this blog approaches, I checked and there were no blogs on music.  Now there is.

The image associated with this blog is of the Anat Fort Trio, a jazz triad I only discovered this year.  We live in such extraordinary times that I cannot tell you if I discovered this trio during a lunch hour tune-in to Toronto’s magnificent CJRT, Toronto’s JazzFM91, or whether it was an Apple Music algorithm that inferred my affection for this trio based on my most frequently played recordings.

Minnesota, my latest musical heartthrob, starts with a vast four note hook.  I hear that hook as a question and as the gentlest suggestive nod to look here or maybe hear-look.  That hook keeps repeating octaves higher, lower, and rhythmically through the bass line while the brushed percussion opens new perspectives within which the harmony sounds.  It must be an open-ended question type of song because my sense is that it’s not about a destination or climax but about being there in the moment, in these tender spare places.

Why am I sharing this with you?  Is there anything important here?  I think there is. Martha Nussbaum (2019, p. 225) wrote that, “I’ve spoken of poetry and novels.  These go to work on our inner eyes in moments of solitary contemplation.  But we also need experiences of art in which we are kinetic and active, engaged in making something together.”  Listening—being in—musical moments, listening with your whole self, is the essence of “making something together” of experienced musical moments.

Nussbaum reminded of Wordsworth’s kinesis in Tintern Abbey which, as probably intended, has haunted me since my first reading with an old friend in our youth, pre-first year classes, in McNeill House Residence (appropriately named after an English prof.).  Such is the power of the poem that when you Google “Tintern Abbey” the poetry precedes the Welsh Christian ruins.

These beauteous forms,
Through along absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life…

I listen to music because I love it.  If Wordsworth and Nussbaum were accurate, the music creates in me a cleaner “inner eye;” a tranquil restoration within my purer mind.  And here we enter interpretive territory.  The purer mind is, to me, aesthetic perception: loving something because its beauty is so compelling that I cannot not love it.  That’s what the Anat Fort trio’s rendition of Minnesota does for me.

What I hope this reflection does for at least one reader, is take her back to any musical, literary, painterly, architectural, or filmic moment in which an inner sky opened—revealing clean, pure beauty of such power that hopefulness seems the only reasonable option.

Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from this BCC’d emailing list.

References

Anat Fort Trio, (2010, August 20). Minnesota.  ECM Records GmbH.

Nussbaum, M. C. (2018). The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis.  Simon & Schuster.

Wordsworth, W. (1798). Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour.  July 13, 1798.  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45527/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey-on-revisiting-the-banks-of-the-wye-during-a-tour-july-13-1798