François Matarasso

‘At that time, the problem that was bothering me most about the writing was that, although I’m speaking out of my heart, it comes out on paper like somebody’s talking from a pulpit, pontificating. I didn’t know how to beat this. Whenever you write your private, personal thoughts and put them in essay form, and somebody else reads them, the vision that that person gets is that you are sort of high and mighty and talking down. I really wanted to avoid that, but didn’t know how to avoid that problem.’

Robert M. Pirsig, ‘On Quality, An Inquiry into Excellence, Unpublished and Selected Writings’, edited by Wendy K. Pirsig, Mariner Books, Boston, 2022

A Selfless Art comes out of a tangle of problems, personal and professional, ethical and philosophical. It is actually just a way way of engaging with those problems, not so much in the hope of solving them as perhaps just learning to live with them.

In these words to students at Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1974, Robert Pirsig expresses something that has troubled me about my writing since at least 1994. That year I published Regular Marvels, a handbook for community artists and animateurs, and inevitably began to sound as if I was telling people what to think and do.

I was. Regular Marvels was a handbook for people coming into their first jobs: I remembered my first job, and thought how good it would be to have a friendly book to turn to when you didn’t know the answer. I imagined that, like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, my handbook had the comforting words ‘Don’t Panic’ on the front cover.

Since then, I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words about community art, in books, speeches, articles and blog posts. I write from the heart, as well as the head, from my experience as well as my reading. But still it comes across, in the words of one good friend, as ‘teachy’. That’s one of the problems I do want to solve in A Selfless Art and paradoxically it requires me to be more open, more personal—more selfish, even—in order to escape the writer’s authority, the one-sided pontification of the pulpit. And that will require more courage than I’ve had in the past.

A writer is just someone who is sharing what’s in their mind and their heart. A good writer is just someone who can do that with more than the usual degree of craft, imagination, authenticity, integrity, courage and selflessness. But every writer, every artist, is just a human being making sense of their experience and sharing that sense with others. One of my tasks in this book is to find a way down from the pulpit, to a place where the co-creation that is reading can be equally empowering to creator and re-creator.