All my life I loved beauty and found ways to immerse in it—nature, music (both listening and playing instruments), art on the walls of our house, spaces I tried to create, usually in my bedroom. I always asked for funds or labor to create that space and we moved frequently so it was an ongoing effort. I took ballet late and danced with the 10-year-olds when I was fourteen because it was beautiful and I wanted to feel its beauty in my body and rise to its movements. I lived in Japan from age six to seven and came to an awareness of beauty in the particularity of this place with such a strong and immersive aesthetic such that I still remember those early encounters with great specificity.

Later, I studied poetry intensely in college and graduate school as an MFA student. The education in poetry in the late 1980s into the early 2000s, with my wonderful teachers, involved reading poems aloud and looking at how poems were made with people who made them. These practitioners looked at poems differently than the critics. We learned to notice skill, beauty, harmony, and ideas “in the gown” (as Dickinson says). We marveled and learned to think the poet’s thoughts after them and what it felt like to say those thoughts and figures in your mouth, and hear them in your ears. However, to follow this course of study I had to encounter more and more rarified kinds of experience separate from the common life I had in the communities I was a part of. Oddly, it wasn’t until I was about thirty-five that my community heard any of my poems. A teacher at my children’s school, where I was deeply involved, asked me to recite one of my poems before a poetry event the K-12 students were having. It felt strange, exposed, and vulnerable to do this and for my people to be able to render a judgment about whether what I had made could move them, speak to them, or be meaningful to them. It wasn’t always so in history.

For the Greeks, the Medievals, and in the Renaissance, common life included the fine and common arts as a matter of course. Greek public events combined sport and poetry and dance. The community gathered around theater performance that was central to the well-being of the republic and that was deeply political and communal but also delightful and social.

Later, church buildings and public buildings were manifestations of all the fine and common arts and you were present to them all the time as a matter of course, like mother’s milk. In them was music, visual art (frescoes, crosses, icons, carvings, baptismals), bibles, musical scores (scripted and illuminated), soaring stones and wood all made into artful spaces that required the highest skill to exist. Not only did you imbibe them, you also considered them the principle beauty of your life. Rare was it to have such things at home but the church or the public government building were also yours, and as a citizen you took personal ownership and satisfaction from the commonly held spaces. You also had access and exposure to these arts regardless of your learning and economic status.

One example of this is the Palazzo Pubblico where local government meetings were held under the frescoes of the Allegory of Good and Bad Government that provided a visual and immersive example of the civic values of the Siennese. Every cathedral and stave church in each village did likewise, and you would have found yourself there multiple times per week (sometimes daily), steeping in the fine and common arts as part of your common and communal inheritance.

What does this have to do with the question of the relationship of the fine arts and the common arts to the liberal arts? Like so much in our contemporary, industrial experience, we are deracinated from this embodiment of the liberal arts that daily life used to contain. No longer do we make contact with the kind of realized, tangible fruit of the liberal arts. In those cultures, you didn’t even need to read to be familiar with such stories, music, dance, rhythms, and beautiful language (in the liturgy). It was a matter of course that every human, no matter how low in the social hierarchy or the wealth spectrum, came into contact with fine and common arts, with the highest skill and beauty.

Now it is backward—most are literate but don’t have even a glancing familiarity with the telos of literacy, the riches, the embodiment of the liberal arts that are a human inheritance that our body’s built-in senses open us to naturally. We are impoverished in what is our birthright. The common arts and the fine arts that were once a natural part of daily life, and the first contact with the liberal arts, are now enjoyed by the rich and highly trained only. We have to begin by believing that these are deeply tied to the liberal arts, that they are intrinsically the embodiment of the liberal arts, that they are the fruit of that knowing and an active knowledge essential to living well, living commonly, and, for some, to go further, to make their way back to the root of these, to the liberal arts.

Christine Perrin has taught at Messiah University and in classical schools since 1999. She and her husband, Christopher, currently teach the course Architecture of Virtue to seniors. She has published two books: Bright Mirror (poems) and The Art of Poetry.

Christine Perrin, MFA Professor, Author

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