Actually it was the bus. I was riding the bus and fat streams of sun flooded through the windows and I was warm for twenty minutes or so. The driver had the FM classical station going and I heard Beethoven’s 4th symphony and I don’t know why but I recalled a Disney “made for TV” film about Beethoven that I saw on Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color” circa 1965 when I was 10. It might have been a year earlier or later–it doesn’t matter. The film in question dates from the mid-50’s and the scene I remembered today on the bus depicted Beethoven conducting the premiere of one of his later symphonies and someone had to get up and turn him toward the audience so he could see they were applauding.
I don’t know why this came to me. But I was thinking in the sunbeams of the gentle and decent kindness reflected by someone turning the deaf composer to behold his audience. I don’t know if there’s any factual basis to this depiction. Perhaps I could find out. I don’t want to find out. I am as ever in love with the idea that art is a community matter rather than a private thing. Someone turns the composer so he can see the effect of his ardor on strangers. It is this ardor that matters. But no less important is the human enterprise of gently turning a disadvantaged man toward his community. The art makes this possible not laws or religion.
Later in the 19th century art would become something different. It would be ground up and spit out by capitalism in ways that affected the artist by removing him from community–the image of the starving and isolated genius emerges as a keen co-efficient of industrial alienation and is its fittest symbol. And no coincidence that this is when disability becomes a mark of further exclusion from the mainstream. These tendencies are strictly attached.
My bus ride was a soft, unanticipated escape from the dailiness of darkling thoughts and I was happy there in all that light on the East Side Express.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
Hey, I remember that Walt Disney special. In Los Angeles, the WWOC was at 7:30 p.m., preceded by Lassie at 7:00 a.m. My cheap, miserly Iowa dad was the reason we were probably the only kids in the neighborhood that watched the WWOC in black & white. The house rule was that my brother and I had to be in our jammies before we could sit down at the TV. I’d rush to get dressed, sit down at the TV just as the Lassie music started, and immediately started to cry. Lassie was always getting into one sort of tragic pickle or another, and the music pretty much let the audience know that they were in for more of the same. Here’s what Music Academy Online has to say about Ludwig:
“One famous story concerns the premiere of the Ninth Symphony in Vienna on May 9, 1824. When the performance was over, the deaf composer, who had been assisting in the conducting of the performance, was turned toward the audience so he could see the audience’s overwhelmingly enthusiastic applause.” The scholar probably got that story from watching WWOC as a child and doesn’t even realize it.
http://musicacademyonline.com/composer/biographies.php?bid=22
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Life’s greatest pleasures do not involve money. Nothing feels better than physical sensations like the one you described. The sun on a frigid day flowing warmth through glass feels great. After I read what you wrote I went into my living room and was delighted to see my black lab basking in the sun pouring through my living room window.
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