Some piano music

(Artwork by Banksy)

Some friends of mine on Facebook have been posting this video, and I thought I might share it here.

An artist in Santiago de Chile placed pianos around the city (I'm supposing mainly downtown) so that people could play them. Apart from one that was destroyed (no one knows by whom), the pianos are still there and people play them.

The video is of a homeless man, covered with his 101 dalmatians blanket, playing some tunes on the piano. 

It shocked me not because he was a homeless man and he was playing the piano, but at how no one (included myself) would have expected that a homeless man knew how to play the piano. What shocked me wa the comments, saying "oh this is amazing!" as if it was an orangutan dancing ballet or an elephant performing the Haydn trumpet conerto. I think we tend to see homeless people as something less than human, as less worthy in some way of living in the same world as we do. I remember that I went with my school on some days to give "breakfast" to the homeless at 7.00 am, I did it maybe 3 or 4 times, I don't remember, but I thought it was so humiliating for them. I must recognize I don't know if they appreciated the sandwiches we gave them, maybe they did, but it was the fact that most of them were sleeping at that hour, and we had to wake them up, in the cold morning, to give them tea or coffee and sandwiches. I don't know, I've always felt that we treat these people as though they are less human, chasing them away from our doors, waking them up to give them sandwiches, throwing our leftovers at them. 

I think this video is very important because it can help more people see the homeless as human beings. This man was not always homeless, he has a story behind him, he suffers, he loves, he feels cold, he feels hot, he dreams at night, there is nothing different between him and us, he is part of us. 

He does not have a house, you say? But, do we have one ourselves? Do we actually own anything? Music teaches us this: we do not own anything. How can you own a G minor chord? It doesn't exist, neither does the Rachmaninov 2nd piano concerto, beutiful as it is, exist. Only while you listen to it it exists. 

I just think we tend to marginalize that which we do not understand. We cannot imagine why someone would not have a house, we shudder to think how it might be to sleep under a bridge: the thought of it is terrifying, so we push them away from our sight, we sweep them under the carpet, where no one will see them. We do this with everything that scares us, everything that we don't understand. Art is an example, emotions are an example, God is an example. We try to simplify them, to make them measurable, we mutilate them so that they fit our rigid strucutres and, when they don't, we just discard them, we throw them sandwiches from the window of our cars.