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In the correspondences that make up this book, I have revelled in the freedom to throw off the shackles of academic convention, and to write unashamedly as an amateur. All true scholars, I believe, are amateurs. Literally, the amateur is one who studies a topic not – like the professional – in order to stage a career, but for the love of it, motivated by a sense of care, personal involvement and responsibility. Amateurs are correspondents. And in study they find a way of life that harmonizes with their whole way of living in the world. Admittedly, this appeal to amateurism is not without its pitfalls, especially in a political climate in which professional expertise is routinely dismissed as the posturing of a technocratic elite more interested in shoring up their own status and privilege than in listening to the common sense of ordinary, unlettered folk. Something must be added to our definition of what it means to be an amateur, lest we risk a descent into crude populism.

On reflection, the two words I think we need are rigour and precision. Amateur study, to be worthy of the name, must be rigorous and precise. Both terms, however, call for some unpacking. Thinking about the idea of rigour initially put me in mind of my own lifelong attempts, as an amateur musician, to master the cello. While they have involved years of practice, struggle, frustration and even pain, they have nevertheless brought a great sense of personal fulfilment. Rigour has its rewards. Recently, however, I had the good fortune to read an article by the artist and visual anthropologist Amanda Ravetz, and it forced me to think again.⁴ Ravetz is concerned with what it means to say of art that it is a process of research, in a context in which research of all kinds is coming under increasingly prescriptive regimes of assessment. Currently, the gold standard for research rests on three criteria: originality, rigour and significance. It is not unreasonable, Ravetz thinks, to judge artistic research by its significance and originality. Rigour, however, risks killing it off. But is this the same rigour, I wondered, that I bring to my cello practice?

One can question the etymology of the word. Ravetz traces it to the Middle English variants of rig, covering everything from the strip of the medieval ploughman to the spine of an animal and the roof-ridge of a house. My dictionary, however, finds the root of the word in the Latin rigere, ‘to be stiff’, with the further connotations of rectitude, rigidity, numbness and morbidity. Whichever derivation you prefer – and perhaps they are connected – hardness and severity seem to be at the heart of it. Rigour is bereft of feeling, yields nothing to experience, and induces instant paralysis in anything living or moving with which it might come into contact. Is this the way of the so-called ‘hard sciences’? Then it is one to which the amateur scholar must be resolutely opposed. For having chosen to align his or her entire life and being with the subject of study, the amateur seeks a softer and more sympathetic approach, one that both answers to the call of the subject and is in turn answerable to it. The response is tinged with responsibility, curiosity with care. There is what Ravetz calls a ‘correspondence with felt vitality’. And for her, this correspondence is anything but rigorous. This doesn’t mean that it is thoughtless, bland or insensitive to difference. The conventional opposition between expertise and common sense tends to imagine the former as consisting of peaks of knowledge, rising from an otherwise homogeneous and featureless plateau. The landscape of correspondence, however, is infinitely variegated. To correspond with things is to follow these variations. ‘The thinking that joins with things,’ as Ravetz puts it, is ‘heterogeneous, emergent, situated and cloudy.’⁵ It is continuously in touch with feeling, with lived experience. What does it mean, then, to study along these lines?

We are dealing, here, with a contrast between two kinds of thinking. There’s a thinking that joins things up, and a thinking that joins with things. In one case the things have already precipitated out, as data, from the processes of their formation; the task, then, is retrospectively to reconnect them. In the other, the things are ever-emergent, and the task is to enter into the forward movement of their ongoing generation. Consider, for example, the straight line, famously defined by Euclid as the shortest connection between points. Determine the points, and you have already specified the line. This line has no breadth; it is abstract and insensible. It is not like the taut strings of my cello, which have a certain weight and thickness, and which, moreover, bend and vibrate when bowed or plucked. It is not like the straight furrow of the ploughman that is cut as he goes along, and calls for his constant and vigilant attention so as to maintain its equidistance from, and alignment with, the adjacent rig. It is not like the rigging of the ship, which in its alternating tension and relaxation allows for the precise adjustment of the sails in response to prevailing winds. Nor is it like the perfectly straight lines that the artist Jaime Refoyo taught me to draw freehand, but only after having first instructed me in how to find a certain balance of forces and muscular tensions within my own body, calling also for a heightened perceptual awareness of my immediate surroundings. If there is rigour in these lines, it is neither immobile nor insentient. It lies, rather, in the precision of close attunement: in the tension of the cello string, yielding a determinate pitch on vibration; in the ploughman’s attention to the field; in the mariner’s attention to the wind; in my attention to my body and its environs.

It would seem that there are two varieties of rigour, virtually the opposite of each other: one that demands accuracy in the recording, measurement and integration of an unyielding world of objective facts; the other that calls for practised care and attentiveness in an ongoing relation between conscious awareness and lively materials. In the latter, and not the former, lies the rigour of correspondence. And this is where precision comes in. For it should not be confused with accuracy. Dancers, for example, are precise rather than accurate in the observations that allow them to attune their movements to one another. Here, precision rests on the capacity to flex in response to others’ movements. The same goes for any kind of craft, where the skill of the practitioner lies in an ability to attune the movements of the sensing body to tools and materials in a way that calls forth relations of line, surface, scale and proportion. The dancer and the artisan are amateurs. They are amateurs because their dance, their craft, proceeds along a way of life. Their practice is careful, attentive, rigorous, but its rigour is of the second kind. Let’s call it amateur rigour, a rigour that is flexible and in love with life, by contrast to the professional rigour that induces rigidity and paralysis.