Educational opportunities lurk in unlikely places. A few days ago, while seated on the throne at the end of the house where my wife’s study is located, I heard a southern voice speaking in an encouraging voice about—well, what was it about? It was coming through or around a wall, with intermittent intelligibility, but I thought I caught a certain drift. Some lady was giving instructions on what I supposed was a horticultural topic. “Take you measured long leaf, tidily trimmed at either end, and find what you take to be as close as possible to its exact middle garble, garble… grasp the bottom, and fold garble this midpoint…” My business done, I gave this little thought, though I later learned with surprise that Joan had been watching an instructional online video about making a palm cross out of a single narrow palm frond. This is an operation that I myself last formed successfully when I was about twelve years old. It takes some skill, and for me a forgotten one. But the episode brought vividly to my mind the immanence of Palm Sunday, just around the corner.
Somehow there was way more drama attendant upon this memory jog than I would have expected. Even the most variable of variable feasts are in fact not all that variable. As a simple annually recurrent calendrical fact, Palm Sunday’s reappearance in March or April is obligatory. Its religious significance is noted by but a dwindling part of the national population, many of whom are as oblivious of it as I am of National Doughnut Week—on my fairly safe assumption that there must actually be a National Doughnut Week. What made the reminder of Palm Sunday of unusual significance to me was the association it now has for me with the Coronavirus Pandemic. At a funeral in March of last year a man declined to shake hands with me. While the effect of his refusal was rather startling, its manner was diffident and apologetic. “I don’t think we are supposed to do that,” he said. That was my first conscious awareness of the regime of medical “social distancing”. By April 5—the date of Palm Sunday last year—we were not having funerals or any other church services. That April there were 65,000 Coronavirus deaths in our country.
A year of pandemic, especially one further distorted by political passion and dramatic social tensions, has doubtless taught us all many lessons. The two somewhat eccentric ones I shall take up in this essay are things I have discovered about the Internet, what it is very good for and what it is not so good for. One thing it is very good for—providing you have patience and lots of spare time—is the instructional video. The construction of a palm cross is, when compared with, say, the construction of a catalytic cracking plant, a fairly simple undertaking, But if all you are working from are unillustrated verbal instructions, it may not work that way. My old friend Richard de Fourneval (fl. 1250) says that there are two modes of teaching: par parole, that is, verbal instruction, and par peinture, that is, by pictorial illustration. When the two are intelligently and harmoniously joined, the educational effect can be impressive. Richard had in mind the union of word and image in the hand-made book, or manuscript, as we usually call it. Video photography has the potential to maximize the synergy of the verbal and the pictorial in our own age.
I have discovered that there is an instructional video dealing with any activity on which I have sought tutelage. For me, this has primarily meant house and garden stuff. There cannot be a carpentry, plumbing, or wiring task for which you cannot find several Youtube tutors. The abundance, indeed, is one of the problems. There are many videos, but not many really good ones. Indeed, most of them, in my experience, are pretty bad. That is because the ability to make a perfect dovetail joint is very different from the ability to explain how it is done, or to use videography effectively. This is where the time and patience come in. You may have to look at six or seven of them before you find the right one, provided that there is indeed a right one. But ordinarily it takes no more than three or four minutes to tell whether what you are watching is going to be of use. On rare occasions your craftsman will be so good at pedagogic performance that there is no need for verbal explanations. Somebody drew my attention to three substantial videos made by British master craftsmen—one a carpenter, one a glassblower, and one a blacksmith—in which there is no verbal commentary at all. These are truly works of art about artists at work.
The wild success of Zoom has proved the usefulness of computer technology in creating virtual conversations of various kinds. The most numerous of these are probably also the least successful—the Zoom teaching attempted by our public schools. While a half a loaf may be better than none, it may not be all that much better. I suspect the pandemic will have significantly retarded the progress of a generation of our school children, and with serious results that are likely to appear only in future years. On the other hand it may have remade the office workplace, and seriously affected the economics both of the urban commercial and suburban residential real estate markets—deflating the demand for New York office space while driving the prices of macmansions in Morris County to even more astonishing heights. Zoom meetings are terrible for religious services. The essence of the religious impulse is not belief but community. The purpose of a congregation is to congregate. The very etymology of the word points to the important, indeed indispensable feature of a physical gathering together. Congregation is just about the opposite of “social distancing”, and it certainly is not the same thing as watching something. So I very much hope the year ahead will be very different from the one we have just passed through.
