Air Guitar. Dave Hickey

      As it turned out, that satin doll was that. There were no more jam sessions, due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, and, within three years, my dad was dead. After that, our life remained improvisational, but it was never as much fun. So I kept that musical afternoon as a talisman of memory. I handled it carefully, so as not to knock the edges off, keeping it as plain and unembellished as I could, so I could test the world against it, because it was the best, concrete emblem I had of America as a successful society and remains so. My dad is a part of it, of course, but I see him differently now—not as my dad, so much, but as this guy who would collect all these incongruous people around him and make sure that everybody got their solos.

      So, I have always wanted to tell this story, because it is a true story that I have carefully remembered, but frankly, it is a sentimental story, too—as all stories of successful human society must be—and we don’t cherish that flavor of democracy anymore. Today, we do blood, money, and sex—race, class, and gender. We don’t do communities of desire (people united in loving something as we loved jazz). We do statistical demographics, age groups, and target audiences. We do ritual celebrations of white family values, unctuous celebrations of marginal cultural identity, multiethnic kick-boxer movies, and yuppie sit-coms. With the possible exception of Roseanne, we don’t even do ordinary eccentricity anymore. In an increasingly diffuse and customized post-industrial world, we cling to the last vestige of industrial thinking: the presumption of mass-produced identity and ready-made experience—a presumption that makes the expression, appreciation, or even the perception of our everyday distinctions next to impossible.

      When I wrote the narrative that introduces this essay, I wanted to do one thing: I wanted to tell you a little story about ordinary, eccentric citizens coming together to play some extraordinary music in a little house on the edge of town—to communicate some sense of my own simple wonder—to have you appreciate its majesty. When my wife read what I had written, however, she immediately (and quite correctly) pointed out that my narrative would not be read this way. Most likely, she suggested wryly, it would be read as an allegory of ethnic federalism in which two African-Americans, a Latino, four Irish-Americans, and a German Jewess seek refuge from the dominant culture in order to affirm their solidarity with the international underclass.

      But it was not that way at all! I squealed. My dad and his friends were musical people in postwar Texas, in the nineteen forties, and that was really special in its quiet way. Imposing the cookie-cutter of difference onto their society not only suppressed their commonality, it suppressed their differences, as well—and these people were very different people. All of the people I had known in my life had been very different people, I argued. I had just assumed. . . . Assuming, my wife explained, never won the pony.

      So having failed in my portrayal, I began wondering who could have portrayed that scene. Who could have captured that room in ruby light—the benign whimsy of Butch’s glance at Magda’s sturdy bottom bouncing on the piano bench—my dad and I in our jazz-dude threads—Magda turning in the front seat, good-naturedly shaking her finger at Diego? And to my own surprise, I came up with Norman Rockwell of the Saturday Evening Post. For worse or for glory, I realized, he was the dude to do it—that, in fact, he probably had done it—had painted that scene in my head, because when I was eight years old, Johnny Mercer was teaching me how to listen, and Norman Rockwell was teaching me how to see. I was a student of their work, and they were good teachers. Years before I heard of John Donne, I learned about the intricate atmospherics of “metaphysical conceits” just by walking down the sidewalk singing: Fools rush in / Where wise men fear to tread. / And so I come to you my love, / My heart above my head.

      Moreover, I have no doubt that Rockwell taught me how to remember that jam session, because I could never polish it. I clung to the ordinary eccentricity, the clothes, the good-heartedness, the names of things, the comic incongruities, and the oddities of arrangement and light. So, it has always seemed to me that Rockwell and Mercer must certainly be important artists, not so much because people love them (although that is a part of it) but because I had learned so much from them—and because they both denied it so strenuously. Still, for a long time, I really didn’t know what kind of art they made, or what it did. I only knew that it wasn’t high art, which is defined by its context and its exclusivity—and is always, in some sense, about that context and that exclusivity.

      I decided that, if high art is always about context and exclusivity, the art of Rockwell and Mercer, which denies both with a vengeance, must be about that denial. To put it simply: Norman Rockwell’s painting, like Johnny Mercer’s music, has no special venue. It lives in the quotidian world with us amidst a million other things, so it must define itself as we experience it, embody itself and be remembered to survive. So it must rhyme, must live in pattern, which is the mother of remembering. Moreover, since this kind of art lacks any institutional guarantee of our attention, it must be selected by us—and since it aspires to be selected by all of us, it must accept and forgive us too—and speak the language of acceptance and forgiveness. And since it can only flourish in an atmosphere of generosity and agreement, it must somehow, in some way, promote that atmosphere.

      Thus, there is in Rockwell (as there is in Dickens) this luminous devotion to the possibility of domestic kindness and social accord—along with an effortless proclivity to translate any minor discord into comedy and forgiving tristesse—and this domain of kindness and comedy and tristesse is not the truth, but it is a part of it, and a part that we routinely deny these days, lest we compromise our social agendas. We discourage expressions of these feelings on the grounds that they privilege complacency and celebrate the norm as we struggle to extend the franchise. But that is just the point (and the point of our struggle): Kindness, comedy, and forgiving tristesse are not the norm. They signify our little victories—and working toward democracy consists of nothing more or less than the daily accumulation of little victories whose uncommon loveliness we must, somehow, speak or show.

      The wicked norm, like the name of a vindictive God, is never spoken or shown, not by human beings, whose acts are necessarily willful, who only speak and show to qualify that norm, to distinguish themselves from it, to recruit more dissenters, to confirm some area of mutual dissent from its hegemony. So if, for no apparent reason, I tell you “The sky is blue,” you will not believe I am telling you that. You will read for the subtext of dissent, for the edge of qualification. You will suspect that I am indulging in lyrical effusion, perhaps, trying to awaken your dulled senses to the “blueness” of the sky at this moment. Or, if you are more suspicious, you will suspect that by saying “The sky is blue,” I am inferring that whatever you have just said is too fucking obvious to qualify as human utterance. If, on the other hand, you receive a memorandum from the government officially stating that the sky is blue, you will shrug, but you will believe it, since the government labels things, then counts them, and averages them out. Defining the norm is its instrument of control over idiosyncrasy.

      So

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