Dry spell over

Regular readers will know that I occasionally go through phases of writing poetry. Some of my friends know that once I even went through a phase of writing songs. I haven’t written anything decent for ages, and until this morning it had been quite a long time since I’d written anything at all. But this morning I wrote this:

Hideaway

There are places you can pay

To hide your stuff away

Where supply never outstrips demand for floorage

But there’s one thing they won’t hide

And that’s who you are inside

So it’s odd this industry is called self-storage

Not very good, is it? I tried developing it into a four-chord song, but I couldn’t get that to work at all. One of the reasons it doesn’t work (as a poem) is because it really ought to be called ‘Self-Storage’, but that’d give away the punchline. I’d call it ‘Untitled’, but I hate things being called that. The only titles I hate more than that are ones like ‘Untitled (Bowl of Fruit)’ and so on. Another problem is that most of line four and all of line five is deliberate clunking sixth-form poetry cliché, a device I've used more effectively in the past but which doesn't add much here. The other main defect is that "floorage" was chosen more or less solely because it was the least terrible rhyme I could think of for "storage". But although this one doesn’t work, it’s nice to be writing anything at all after such a long dry spell. I’ll let you know if I write one that doesn’t suck.

An embarrassment of riches

I don’t much like the Wanted. I don’t think I’m missing out there, because they’re not much good. I’ve never been able to enjoy Chopin much either, but my understanding is that there I am missing out, because Chopin is good. Everyone knows that, even people like me who don’t like listening to him. Maybe there are people who are informed enough about this sort of thing to hold the maverick opinion that Chopin sucks, but the consensus among those who know is, unless I’m very much mistaken, that Chopin’s good. I don’t think this gives me a categorical reason to listen to Chopin, but it does mean that if I make the effort to educate myself then there’s enjoyment to be had, and maybe some edification, elevation and long-lasting happiness too. That’s not true of the Wanted, and that means they suck. I think looking at it this way makes me an aesthetic objectivist, and I don’t think it commits me to anything weird. So I guess I must disagree with Mackie about how far his queerness argument against objective values generalises.

Now, one thing that worries me about looking at beauty this way is that too many things are going to end up beautiful. There’s a fine line between dismissing the Wanted as cynical flummery and dismissing gamelans en masse as an ugly racket. That’s the line I’d like to tread. I think the way to dismiss the Wanted is to admit it’s at least possible that some cultures’ music is just a bit rubbish. The Wanted are a midrange example of music from a recognisable subculture, but no matter how much I learn to appreciate even Take That or the Spice Girls they’re never going to enrich my life the way Mozart enriches the lives of people who really get him. And even if they did, that would be a peculiarity on my part, whereas Mozart’s music is something that pretty much anyone should be able to learn to enjoy. We’ve all seen the Shawshank Redemption.

On the subject of dismissing some cultures as not very good at music, I don’t think it makes me a chauvinist. Take all the beautiful music my culture (if you'll pardon the idealisation - nothing I'm saying needs the world to divide nicely into cultures) has ever produced and erase it from history. Would some of the dross have become beautiful to replace it, in a metaphysical seizure of political correctness? I don’t think it’s chauvinistic to say that it wouldn’t have. Our culture would have been impoverished, just as it was to a lesser extent impoverished before the Renaissance, or before the Beatles, or before The Art of Coarse Golf. Even now people freely admit that France outpaints Britain, and that person for person Ireland outwrites almost everywhere.

Having dismissed the Wanted, how do we save the gamelan? Well, I think the solution to the first problem solves the other. If I’d been a relativist of some kind and said that aesthetic judgement was indexed to a standard of taste, I’d have had a job completely dismissing the Wanted. But I didn’t do that: I said there’s nothing to stop a culture producing only rubbish. A nation of Philistines (maybe the Philistines?) might all love bad music, but nobody is missing out by not listening to it, and when their children first hear the Beatles they’ll rightly dismiss their parents’ musical tastes as benighted, and their cultural lives will be enriched as a result. But if the Philistines’ music can’t be described as beautiful just because they like it, then the gamelan can’t be dismissed just because I don’t. Not indexing our aesthetic judgement to a standard of taste means there’s an awful lot of beauty out there if you’re willing to learn to appreciate it. But that’s true, isn’t it?

How should I make her feel?

Rihanna’s recently had a big hit with a song called “Only Girl (in the World)”, and I’m puzzled by the chorus. She sings:

“Want you to make me feel like I’m the only girl in the world

Like I’m the only one who you’ll ever love

Like I’m the only one who knows your heart...”

Fair enough, you’ll think. Rihanna wants me to pay attention to her, and not to any other girls. But the first line is an odd way of expressing it.

If I was in a romantic situation with Rihanna, this would be more meaningful for both of us if she wasn’t the only girl in the world. If she was, this would mean that I might well not be with her because I thought her pretty, talented or whatever, or even because we had some kind of extraordinary intellectual connection. I’d want to be with her anyway, because there’d be nobody else. We’d also both know that she was very keen on me indeed, because of all the men in the world who’d rather be with her than no girl at all, she’d picked me. This would give the relationship a most peculiar dynamic. On one hand, I’d have to work much more at the relationship because of the supply and demand situation, even though she’d probably be more into me than I was into her. Perhaps there are actual relationships like this: if X has more choice than Y you might expect, other things being equal, X to like Y more and Y to have to work harder to keep X. I realise other things aren’t equal, because people with more choice tend to be more likeable. But it’d surprise me if no actual relationships were like this. Maybe you’re in one. It doesn’t sound fun. But one would expect these kind of relationships to be the norm in a world with the kind of gender imbalance which Rihanna wants her beloved to make her feel obtains.

 

I’m also puzzled by the interaction between the first line and the next two. If she’s the only girl in the world then she will be the only girl in the world with each property she instantiates, in these cases the properties of being loved by me at some point and knowing my heart. So she could achieve the same effect by feeling like she was the only girl in the world, that I’d love her at some point and that she knew my heart. It’s possible that at least the second line can be made to say more than this by shifting the implicit quantifier from a presentist one to an eternalist one: she wants to feel like she’s the only girl in the world now, that I’ll love her at some point and that there won’t be any new girls arriving into the world whom I’ll one day love. But the age differences or space travel involved make this interpretation implausible.

Maybe we should read the definite descriptions in lines two and three as Russellian, i.e. she’ll feel like there are no other girls who know my heart or whom I’ll ever love; and the first one as Lewisian, i.e. she’ll feel like she’s the most salient girl in the world. This suggests that definite descriptions are ambiguous between these two readings though, which I doubt. Instead we could take the first definite description as Russellian but with the quantifier restricted to very salient things, but without conversationally presupposing how salient objects would be in the context of the feelings she wants her beloved to make her have. I think that’s probably what she’s getting at.