The Topical Autobiography of Mark Dorset

Mediocrity

What is man in nature? He is nothing in comparison with the infinite, and everything in comparison with nothingness, a middle term between all and nothing.
     Pascal, Pensées (72)

     From kindergarten through the fourth grade, my classmates and I spent most of each school day in a single classroom with a single teacher, who taught us everything from art to arithmetic, but in the fifth grade, that pattern was interrupted at intervals by “special instruction.”
     A science teacher arrived twice a week; he was a double novelty because he was a special instructor and because he was a man. Before his appearance, all of my instructors had been women. He gave amazing demonstrations of the dangers of chemistry. An art teacher visited once a week; she arranged groupings of fruit on the teacher’s desk and had us draw them while she tried to teach us the trick of perspective.
     A music teacher also visited us once a week. He was a jovial man with a mustache. On his first visit, I think that all of us expected him to lead us in choral singing, which had been the whole of our musical instruction in the past. Instead, he brandished a small black thing that looked like a stick, waggling it as if he were about to conjure with it, perhaps to make it disappear, or to turn it into a bouquet of roses, or a rabbit. No. He put one end of it to his mouth and made a tune flow from it. Ah, we thought, a musical instrument. Of course. We should have known.
     He lowered the instrument and smiled. We recognized the smile for what it was, an invitation to applaud. We applauded. “Thank you,” he said. “Now what would you think if I told you that every one of you will be able to play what I played in just two weeks?”
     Without giving us a chance to answer, he launched into a pitch for the little flute that he had played, the Tonette. It was a duct flute or “fipple flute,” a flute stripped to the minimum, sized for small hands, with just seven finger holes. He had us pass one around the room, so that we could see for ourselves how well it fit us and how easy it was to blow a musical note out of it. His sales pitch was good, but the Tonette really sold itself. Many of us had taken music lessons on one instrument or another. In nearly every case, the instrument had overwhelmed us, eventually beaten us, and the experience had humbled us, even humiliated us. I think that most of my classmates understood the Tonette as I did: it was an instrument that we could get the better of, a small, simple thing, a pushover. We bought the idea of the Tonette, and we cajoled our parents into buying them for us.
     Within a week or two we were a Tonette orchestra. I tootled along happily with all the others for weeks and weeks, while we learned more and more tunes, mostly simplified versions of traditional songs.
     Then, on one of the days when special instruction in music was scheduled, I forgot to bring my Tonette to school. With no instrument to play, I had to sit silently and listen to the others while they ran through our repertoire in preparation for our public debut at a parents’ night in the spring. I’m not sure what I expected to hear when my classmates performed, listening from a position outside the performance, rather than from within it. I’m not even sure that I had any expectation at all about what I would hear. I do know what I did hear, and I know that it puzzled me enormously.
     As a group, they certainly weren’t good, but they weren’t awful, either. They were hardly anything at all. All of them were playing, all their little flutes were tootling, and if I had given it enough thought, I might have said that the result was something like oatmeal. It wasn’t flavorless, but its flavor was insipid. The combined effect of those massed Tonettes was like the flatness of a bay on a day that has about it the stillness of death. The players cancelled one another’s defects, but they had also cancelled one another’s virtues. Minus the worst and the best, they were mediocre. By extension, I understood that when I was playing in the Tonette orchestra we were mediocre.
     I considered this a wonderful discovery, because it relieved me of the feeling that I had no talent for music. I knew that alone I was awful, even at the very simple music that came from a Tonette, but when I heard the class play I understood that I had a place in the aggregation. The mob had room for everybody, and that included me.

 
The Tonette
Anyone can play it!