The Guitarist

What stops people on the street? What arrests them more than the cold or the creaky plastic slip of their gloves? What stops the shoppers on their forward march or the families rushing to get home?

Not much. Not love, nor money, nor charity workers. But Lukas can.

I’ve seen him perform magic. Groups gathering around in silent clusters like church worshippers; old men in smart suits and flat-caps pausing for a silent ovation; elegant ladies throwing a condescending coin into his propitious guitar-case. He does not collect money – he collects letters and gold – tokens of love. What did Max say? Great art is the transparency of self.* It is about communication: the communication of the inner world; the projection of it and the willing absorption of it by another. So great art has the same structure as love.

And he is not even technically a guitarist – he is a guitarist with piano-playing hands. So what is it about it his playing that is so undeniably beautiful? It is him. It is the transparency of self. It is not the music that is beautiful, but Lukas.

These are the compliments that a lover bestows. I realise that; yet through Lukas I am learning and discovering something about art more truthful than anything I discovered in years of reading in libraries. Art should be affective. Affect and effect; they are connected. Beauty. The long phrase. Making people happy. Because Lukas’s musical achievement is one of communication: the spiralling coin signifies contact. Playing on the streets completes him because it is a way of talking to the people around him. His playing is an act of love, an act of social grace, as Auden might say, ‘a mouth’.

*For an opposing view please see my discussion in “The Swing Guitarist”