Allegory of the Seven Liberal Arts, Marten de Vos, 1590, oil on oak panel
I am one of those with the affliction of getting words and songs stuck in my head, sometimes for days or weeks and longer on end. I had the song Midnight at the Oasis repeating in my head during most of my twenties and am only recently able to think about it without its becoming re-lodged. I have yet to learn a reliable technique for dislodging songs, but thought it might help if there were something like a call-in radio program that played only songs stuck in peoples’ heads, see if there were any common traits, and then just do my best to avoid listening to them in the first place.
With words it’s easier. I simply look them up and deconstruct their meaning and etymology, which often reveals something hidden I was actually looking for. This happened yesterday when I overheard the word trivial spoken while a group of people were looking at the work of Anni Rapinoja at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The word was being used dismissively, but I agreed, the work was indeed trivial, but seen from a different perspective, this could be an asset, something to strive for.
The word ‘trivial’ derives from the Latin trivialis, commonplace, ordinary. A related word is trivium, which refers to the lower three of the Seven Liberal Arts- grammar, logic and rhetoric; the upper four, the quadrivium being arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. I believe craft is in a unique position to exalt the trivial by drawing our attention to the most ordinary, commonplace aspects of everyday life, which are frequently overlooked in pursuit of loftier ideals.