Love and Loveliness
The Amateur and the Lover’s Proper Work
Two things this week: a reflection on the true meaning of the word “amateur” and an update about some new music.
In his “cookbook”, The Supper of the Lamb (a strange and delightful book), Robert Farrar Capon explains that he writes about cooking as an “amateur”. He is quick, however, to correct what that word typically implies:
Amateur and nonprofessional are not synonyms. The world may or may not need another cookbook, but it needs all the lovers—amateurs—it can get.
I somehow had never noticed that the word (coming to English from French) amateur is from the Latin amare, “to love”, and the related noun, amator, “lover”. In that sense, Capon is right, the word is not merely an antonym for “professional”.
The heart of Capon’s book is this insight: the world needs more amateurs, lovers, because it takes a lover to truly see and appreciate the world. The human’s “real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are.” The operative phrase here is “for what they are”—to love the world is to love it for existing: “to be good or bad is not as much of an achievement as to be at all.”
Best of all, the proper work of the amateur is simply to declare the world’s loveliness, for “a silent lover is one who doesn't know his job.” The life of true lovers is to desire, see, enjoy, and finally, give thanks for the beloved.
Where all this leads, for me, is into the mysterious link between love and loveliness. The latter can only become what it is through the former. Lovliness is relational; it is something that emerges in the world through the activity proper to lovers. The lover loves the world for what it is but doing so draws out the world’s loveliness into an even greater fullness.
There, then, is the role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace.
Love and the work of art
I’m also thinking here about art and what its practice requires. Everyone probably shares the common intuition that it’s almost impossible to do something unless at some level you want to do it. We are moved by desire. But what is the object of love in the artist’s work? Is it the work itself? Or maybe the finished piece? I think Capon is onto something when he frames the work of love at a cosmic level—it’s really about the world. Maybe we can think of art as a means of loving the world, of attending to what it is and drawing out its fullness.
Most of the efforts of my work this summer were around music. Some of you will know that around almost 15 years ago in my early twenties I was writing and recording music, touring, and selling DIY compact disks to friends and family. It was an exciting time of collaboration and explosive creativity. I calculated recently that from 2009 to 2011 I made about 9 or 10 albums worth of music on my own and with friends (only some of it seeing the light of day).
I think that time really was motivated by the work of love, a true amateur’s passion. But something stopped working for me as I tried to make the shift towards a business mindset that required thinking through things like branding, press, marketing, investment (in short, trying to think of my music as a product). I don’t believe any of these things are bad or that they will necessarily compromise the work of the art itself. At that time, though, I felt desire leading me somewhere different.
Since finishing my PhD program last year, music has come back to my life in an explosive way that has me feeling again like I’m twenty years old, aflame with the loveliness of the world and possessed by the need to express what I see in song.
On October 4, I will be releasing a new song called “The Grey Line” and in the next month I hope to write more about where it came from and how it came to be. For now, here’s a link to pre-save this new song to your streaming platform of choice, and a sample of what is to come:
If you made it this far, thank you! This newsletter is an attempt to build a way to share about my music and other adventures with fans, friends, and family. The most meaningful way you can support the project, especially in this early stage, is to share it with someone you love.