Art is a medium. That means it stands between. A medium hamburger stands between rare and done. A spiritual medium stands between the living and the dead. Art stands between the yearning individual and their community. Art does not mean valuable or worthless but practically useless, something unnecessary that humans make to express ourselves. Flowers in a vase are art. Movies are art. This missive is art.

Art’s nature changes as the relation between the individual and their community changes. Dead sixty years, my dad would have no idea what a missive was – or a smart phone – or an emoji. Art, to his thinking, was something that humans made with their bare hands. Painters painted, writers wrote, players played. Art that wasn’t face to face – movies, say, or radio – wasn’t really art.

Any work of art is “about” two things: its subject matter and the nature of the relation between artist and audience. The painter of the Lascaux caves was depicting horses, stags, bison, bulls, but also his (or her) attitude toward their paleolithic pals. Ditto Homer, Michelangelo, Thoreau, any maker. They’re showing us what they’re showing us but also signaling from their inarticulate interiors to ours. This missive is “about” art; it is also about the nature of intimacy in our wireless age. With the available media, I am making love.

Humans typically mistake the media of their childhood as permanent. I grew up with paintings on a wall, words on a page, unplugged-in pianos. I wanted to make things my parents’ generation had made. For a word guy that meant books. I never dreamed of an era where books would be less influential media than streaming videos, social media, podcasts, memes, blogs, video games, etc. Books to today’s young are bulky, expensive, slow, clumsy, so yesterday. You and I are word-people finding our way in a wireless world. These missives are technology-enabled, different from books, but a far stretch from Tik-Tok, let’s hope.

I will never recover from my love of books. I will always rate their durable silence preferable to the fleeting flickering on my screen. I realize these words will be devoured instantly, yet (absurdly) they aspire to the condition of literature. (Per Oscar Wilde: “Ernest: What is the difference between journalism and literature? Gilbert: Oh! Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.”)

Any maker in any epoch is negotiating between the media of their childhood and those of their moment. Most lasting makers are deploying their media as never before. The cave painter in Lascaux and Shakespeare and David Letterman are redefining the connection between maker and audience. Media are always evolving – sometimes at a glacial, at other times a breakneck pace, so fast oldsters gasp they’ve no idea “what’s going on”! A goofy thirty second Tik Tok video may strike me as vacuous, tedious, and misleading but so what, it was not made for me.

A year ago, I’d have pronounced literature moribund, as readers defected from printed books to digital devices. My passions were anachronistic, bygone, as pathetic as a lacemaker’s. Wearily resigned to evanescence, I viewed myself and my few readers as a dwindling remnant, headed for extinction, but so what – we all go down to the dust.

Then a weird thing happened. I tested the popularity of these missives, not hopefully but ruefully, to rule out a future for them, and whadayaknow, Jack’s beanstalk rocketed to the clouds. Four hundred eighty readers multiplied in nine months to thirty three thousand, not despite technology but thanks to it. Word-lovers unite: we are not alone. Literate prose may remain a viable medium after all!