Friday, January 07, 2011
Uranium Madhouse launches Indiegogo campaign
Monday, January 03, 2011
notes on immersion
Which can inspire you to make your own works of art. You can also lose yourself in doing that.
This can be intensely rewarding.
However, there is no artist who walks the earth for whom it ALWAYS turns out well.
Talk all we want about how it's a process. We still like it when it turns out well, and we don't like it when it doesn't.
Creating great work requires immersion. Immersion can end in drowning. This is a fact. Once you've drowned, it's that much harder to immerse yourself.
Although, no lie, Confucius did say "It's easier to live if you're willing to die."
Try that one on for size.
As with art, it's possible to lose yourself in love.
This can also end in drowning.
As with art, that's not a reason not to let yourself be immersed, ultimately at least. But there's no question it becomes more challenging once you've been through the whole drowning thing.
Come to think of it, in thinking this through, I see the Christian rite of Baptism in a whole new light. It's like they're saying "This is what it's like. Get into it." DUNK!!!
In the last six years, I have arranged my creative life in such a way that I was actively engaged in my creative work for 3-6 hours a week. Most of the time, no more than that. I waded, I swam some laps, I bobbed and treaded water. But I pretty much stayed in the shallow end.
That, again, seems about to change.
I think I'm ready. Time will tell.
And wherein lies this readiness?
Well...
Experience, for one thing. Which, as Oscar Wilde famously quipped, is the name that other people give to their mistakes.
I've made plenty of those.
So that's one thing.
I think I also have a clearer picture of what it is to engage in a collaborative enterprise. As the captain of the ship, I can exert a lot of influence on said enterprise. But there are limits. To what I can do. Even I. Having bumped my head against those limits enough, I won't be tempted to pretend they don't exist. In times when things don't go as I had hoped, there may be some comfort in remembering those limits.
I have worked to acquire some decent interpersonal skills. There's always work to do on making those better, but I have some.
I have people around me who truly, truly, love me. No question.
And I feel like I get that it's a marathon, not a sprint. I'm probably a sprinter by nature (Aries), so that may well be what they call "the rub" in this particular instance.
But I have also discovered that I can actually be quite happy splashing around in the shallow end, if push were to come to shove. Sooner or later, the deep end would probably beckon again, but it's nice to know that the shallow end is always an option, at least for a while.
That Yeats may have overstated things at least a wee bit when he spoke of "perfection in the life or in the work."
I stand on the threshold.
Or, to quote the first play I ever directed:
"On the brink. On the beach. On the verge."
The air...is bracing.
Saturday, January 01, 2011
Friday, December 31, 2010
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
above all else
It's crazy not because of what it says but because of how it made me feel. It's Josh Waitzkin's The Art of Learning.
Waitzkin is a child prodigy chess player. He was playing and winning international chess tournaments in his teens and even younger. Then a documentary was made about him, based on his father's book Looking for Bobby Fisher, about Josh's young chess life. And Josh got a taste of celebrity:
But there were problems. After the movie came out I couldn't go to a tournament without being surrounded by fans asking for autographs. Instead of focusing on chess positions, I was pulled into an image of myself as a celebrity. Since childhood I had treasured the sublime study of chess, the swim through ever deepening layers of complexity. I could spend hours at a chessboard and stand up from the experience on fire with insight about chess, basketball, the ocean, psychology, love, art. The game was exhilarating and spiritually calming. It centered me. Chess was my friend. Then, suddenly, the came became alien and disquieting.
He goes on:
My game began to unravel. I began to think about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought. The Grandmasters, my elders, were ignored and scowled at me. Some treated me like a pariah. I had won eight national championships, and had more fans, public support and recognition than I could dream of, but none of this was helping my search for excellence, let alone for happiness.
And then, the money shot:
At a young age, I came to know that there is something profoundly hollow about the nature of fame. I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection. This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time. I missed just being a student of the game, but there was no escaping the spotlight. I found myself dreading chess, miserable before leaving for tournaments. I played without inspiration and was invited to appear on television shows. I smiled.
In some ways, it's a familiar theme and a familiar story: is this all there is to fame? His observations thus far are keen, sincere, and heartfelt, but it's what happened next that makes Waitzman's story so electifying. He discovered T'ai-Chi, and began to study it, and after a time, he had a remarkable realization:
This type of learning experience was familiar to me from chess. My whole life I had studied trechniques, principles, and theory until they were integrated into the unconscious. From the outside T'ai-Chi and chess couldn't be more different, but they began to converge in my mind. I started to translate my chess ideas into T'ai-Chi language, as if the two arts were linked by an essential connecting ground. Every day I noticed more and more similarities, until I began to feel as if I were studying chess when I was studying T'ai-Chi. Once I was giving a forty board simultaneous chess exhibition in Memphis and I realized halfway through that I had been playing all the games as Tai-Chi. I wasn't calculating with chess notation or thinking about open variations...I was feeling flow, filling space left behind, riding waves like I do at sea or in martial arts. This was wild! I was winning chess games without playing chess
Waitzkin went on to compete and win international tournaments in push hands, the martial arts form of T'ai Chi. This was an incredible story: a young man who becomes a beginner again to rediscover the joy of learning, and then goes on to master a totally unrelated field.
There is so much to talk about, even in this first chapter, that it kind of makes me crazy, as I said earlier. I feel like jumping around and shrieking, in a completely crazy way. You will be hearing more about Waitzkin on this blog, believe me. My students will find his book on their curriculum list. But I will close this initial discussion with the following:
A lifetime of competition has not cooled my ardor to win, but I have grown to love the study and training above all else.
This is something I often want to express to students, but I hold back, because coming from someone who makes his living as a teacher, it can sound self-serving. But an actor who has stopped learning has probably stopped acting. A high-performing athlete does not train to be able to stop training: the training continues throughout her career, and ultimately, the training is the source of the true satisfaction. The siren's song of performing in front of an audience is strong, and not necessarily to be resisted. But the pursuit of greater skill is not something that should be abandoned, well, ever.
Take it from the champ:
What I have realized is that what I am best at is not Tai Chi, and it is not chess -- what I am best at is the art of learning.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
