Beauty and The Commuter
There is an article or a you tube video many of you may already have come across. An experiment by the Washington Post, which sought to answer the question:
”In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?”
For all those commuters on the 12th of January 2007, just before 8am, a violinist playing in the metro was most likely little more than background noise to thoughts more focussed on the day ahead and the weekend beyond. What they were all unaware of was the fact that the man playing in the baseball cap and jeans was actually Joshua Bell, an internationally famous music “virtuoso”, who had only a few days before played to a full house at Boston’s Symphony Hall, also holding his priceless Stradivari violin.
The experiment lasts 43 minutes, over six classical pieces and 1,097 people passing by. It is a testing of “context, perception and priority” – what will those people do? The result was perhaps what any cynic would have expected, a total of $32 dollars in the violin case, no crowd and a handful who lingered an extra few minutes before continuing on their way. One person recognised him from a performance they had seen. The video is itself a little heartbreaking to watch..
The Washington post seems surprised, horrified, at the outcome. I’m not entirely sure what other result can be expected from a culture and a society which has to a large extent been programmed to limit our ‘awareness of beauty’ to times outside of the commuting reverie. Commuting is a noisy business. Think of the tannoy announcements hurled at you, crackled, indefinable, and largely monotonous; the jostling of bodies against one another as you fight for your personal space while dreading the thought you may slow the flow down; the smells of perfumes, cologne, coffee and perspiration; underlying it all, that feeling of tension, anxiety, expectation, weariness, and all amidst those swirling thoughts of jobs left incomplete and people yet to be spoken to.
It is no wonder people in the commuting run revert to what I call ‘bubble mode’, myself included. It includes plugging in to a new source of something, whether it be music, books, fantasy, all in the effort to maintain a bubble of peace-like preparation for/distraction from the day ahead. Mine is music, walking, and designing the fictional lives of my fellow commuters along the way.
What does the Joshua Bell experiment reveal? That we can only appreciate beautiful music when we have paid for an allocated time and appropriate setting to enjoy it in? That we are often too self-involved in our own worries to take in any external anomalies? Or does routine have the danger of defaulting us to autopilot mode, impeding our ability to take in any potential surprises that may lie in our path?
I love the students in Stockholme who inserted ‘piano stairs’, and watching a few people do a little ditty-dance of a tune as they climb up them. It would probably take that much to shake us from our morning monotony 
All of this is a reminder to me to keep my eyes open as much as possible, adjust my attitude to a state that will say “what could happen today?”, and meanwhile looking for the weird and banal things that may make me grin or ponder, or the sights and sounds that may make me stop and wonder. If it is true what they say about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, it may be I’ve been letting too much of it pass me by.
Rx
