Читать книгу The Art of Is - Stephen Nachmanovitch - Страница 15

Verbs and Nouns

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me,he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

— Walt Whitman

I was in London for a few days before traveling to a conference on improvisation in Wales. I walked along the South Bank of the Thames, taking in the sun and puffy clouds reflected on the water, gulls wheeling and yawping overhead, and crowds of mostly happy-looking people strolling up and down the walkways, each involved in his or her personal mixture of business and pleasure. I was supposed to give the keynote talk at the conference, which gathered international improvisers from across the arts, including musicians, theater people, dancers, visual artists, filmmakers, educators, psychologists, and others, for a series of talks and performances. While I was looking forward to this conference, as usual I didn’t have the foggiest idea what I was going to say. As a practicing improviser I have grown used to this cloud of unknowing, and to discovering that when the day arrives, the talk will organize itself. But at a certain phase in between, I dissolve into a panic: this time I will have nothing to say, or it will be a confused jumble. I will get up and make a fool of myself.

Last time I was in London, years before, the South Bank was a grungy area of decayed industrial buildings. Now it had been transformed for the new millennium into a miles-long environment of footpaths along the river, with galleries, theaters, and cafés sprouting off to the right. I noticed how architecture is a score for improvisation: the shaped container and guide for a buzzing ecology of individuals, families, small groups, intent business people, tourists, working men and women carrying tools, talking with their friends. The design of the outdoor space that surrounded us lent a particular flavor, a relaxed but energetic style to our collective activity. The walkways, never entirely straight, constantly varying in width and geometry, channeled the stochastic process of people’s activity into a kind of dance.

I wandered into a bookstore. I randomly browsed among the shelves, not looking for anything in particular, passing the psychology section on my right. Suddenly out of the corner of my eye, I saw a book. The spine was fire-engine red, with bold white lettering that said IMPROVISING. Needless to say, I did a double take and turned back to the shelf to find the book that had caught my eye. I was eager to learn who wrote it and what he or she had to say. I scanned the shelves from top to bottom. Nothing. I searched again, thinking that perhaps I had scrambled the letters of another title. But there was no red book. I had hallucinated it. Clearly, in the workings of the unconscious, I was anticipating the improv conference; but something else was at work in that hallucination. Improvisation had been transformed to improvising. Not a noun, but a verb, in the active present.

• • •

This little hallucination encapsulated patterns and ideas that had preoccupied me for decades. Like many such experiences, it was the fast, synaptic summation of information that had always been available, hiding in plain sight. That swift connecting of patterns, flowing through time, is itself what we often mean by improvising. The gift was that I now had a focal point for the talk I was about to give.

It took me a few years more to realize that the book I had imagined in the store was this book.

As the vision of the book and the word improvising came to me, I recognized that I was stepping onto a well-trodden path. My mentor, the anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson, was fond of repeating the slogan STAMP OUT NOUNS, coined by his friend and student Anatol Holt. “Language,” Gregory told me, “can be a wonderful servant but a terrible master.” Nouns break the world and our experience apart, into things. Naming, and manipulating names and symbols, has enabled the lion’s share of our advanced civilization. But in our love of and reliance on language, we tend to confuse the name with the thing named. Bateson often quoted the mathematician and philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who famously said, “The map is not the territory.” The menu is not the meal.

• • •

The general and president Ulysses S. Grant was not the sort of person we would expect to find in an exploration of art, improvisation, and philosophy. But as he was dying of throat cancer in 1885, he spoke of the relationship between consciousness and his diminishing body functions. He said, “The fact is, I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.” He came to see his body and mind as more of a process than a thing. Grant’s was a view of death, a time of obvious transition, but the rest of day-to-day life is like this too; we’re simply not as conscious of it. R. Buckminster Fuller, riffing on Grant’s statement, said, “I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of Universe.”

• • •

Christopher Small, a musicologist strongly influenced by Bateson, suggested that people fundamentally distort music by treating it as a thing; he wanted to get rid of the noun music and replace it with the verb to music, or musicking. Musicking is the real-time activity of grabbing instruments and playing, singing, writing, hearing, tapping on kitchen utensils, dancing. At the moment of listening to a concert, recording, or broadcast, people are linked in participation with others near and far, including the performers. Musicking reframes song as an activity taking place in a particular time and context; it is a process.

Music (or art, literature, theater, science, technology) is often treated as a collection of works arranged on a historical timeline. The scores are regarded as having not only an independent existence but a higher existence than the performances. In the classical music world, history stretches out like a clothesline, with sheets of music notation hanging from it. We sometimes call sheet music the music, whereas it is just a symbolic representation, a helpful aid to communication. The noun music also implies an abstract Platonic entity somewhere up in the ether, where the perfect interpretation exists. We treat the notation or the abstraction as more real than reality. Beethoven’s music becomes a mental deity. But in reality Beethoven’s music, represented on paper, is the archaeological relic of Beethoven’s musicking, a warm human creating, writing, playing, singing, raging in frustration, scratching out notations he didn’t like and writing more, exploding in joy. The editing of a composition, a book, or an architectural drawing is similarly the interactivity of a warm human body in space and time, though the end result may look like a solid object.

Small reminds us that the worlds of popular music likewise turn experiences into objects, and into interchangeable commodities. And so it is in many areas of life. Teaching becomes a curriculum validated by standardized testing, another thing to be attained. Anything we might do can be reified as a thing or lived as a process. Thus, we need to engage those present-tense, active verbs as antidotes to thingness: improvising, musicking, teaching, playing, creating, being.

• • •

In the 1970s Augusto Boal (the first professional improviser to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize) taught a round of theater workshops in Northern Ireland, which at that time was still violently torn apart by sectarian strife. Participants played scenes drawn from their daily lives. Ethnic politics, distinctions between who’s in and who’s out, seemed inescapable, even though these were people who had volunteered for this type of open and shared experience. Boal described how he could virtually see Protestant or Catholic stamped on each person’s forehead. Yet each side could play, as drama or comedy, with the common concerns of family and survival in a tough society, the personal problems that everyone shares. “We should not stamp the name of people’s religions on their foreheads, instead we must try to see the person. To see people without captions!”

How wide the Gulf & Unpassable! between Simplicity & Insipidity.

— William Blake

The phrase “thinking outside the box” arose from a famous problem in cognitive psychology, in which you are shown nine dots arranged in a grid and asked to draw four lines that connect all nine dots, without lifting your pencil. There are a number of solutions, all of which require drawing lines that stick out beyond the imaginary boundary of the square pattern. Quite often we restrict ourselves by seeing the square-that-is-not-there and don’t even think of allowing our pencil to venture into the space around it. “Thinking outside the box” came to refer to thinking, behaving, or perceiving that is not conventional, that is not hackneyed, stereotyped, or robotic. But after being used for years, it has become a hackneyed, stereotyped, robotic cliché. It is a self-canceling message.

Creativity. Innovation. Vision. A generation ago these words were charged with meaning. Now they have become rancid, insipid, and banal. Overuse, and deliberate misuse as marketing buzzwords, have rendered them into cheap commodities with a limited shelf life. When something is described as “cutting-edge,” you just know it’s going to be dull. Christopher Small’s verb musicking, a freshener of our ideas, attitudes, and enjoyment as participants and listeners, has been adopted to an increasing degree by scholars. But there is always the danger that, like any name of an idea, it can turn into yet another dead buzzword, joining our collection of prefigured responses.

Creativity, innovation, improvisation, the very substance of life and learning, devolve into commodities, whether through the trendy marketing lingo of corporations and political actors or the hegemonic obscurity of academic critical theory. Whole industries have sprung up around the idea of creativity, selling it in seminars. Even an activity as ephemeral as improvisation can be commodified and packaged. We invent words like “performativity” and then study them as though they were substances.

• • •

The wonderful word gobbledygook was coined in 1944 by the Texas businessman and politician Maury Maverick. In a memo to his employees, he banned “gobbledygook language.” “Anyone using the words activation or implementation will be shot.” His reference was to the turkey, “always gobbledy gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity. At the end of his gobble, there was a sort of gook.”

Sometimes I feel that habits of language and thought would benefit from going onto an underground conveyor belt, to return to daylight after a century. That is why I love Keith Johnstone’s use of an archaic word, chivalry, to describe how improvisers at their best accept, build on, nourish, and amplify the ideas and imagery developed by their partners. A similar approach is often described as “yes, and . . .” — perhaps the most generative rule of improvisational theater. But “yes, and . . . ,” repeated ceaselessly, has become a platitude ready for the glue factory. Chivalry seems like such a quaint word in these postmodern times that it is ready for some fresh duty.

• • •

When he was in school, my son Jack brought home a fairly typical English assignment concerning a piece of fiction the class had read. The teacher asked what “qualities” a character “possessed” — bravery, creativity, duplicity, and so on. We have this way of talking as though creativity or bravery were a thing one could have. Perhaps it is a fluid, such that one person could have seven ounces of it and another could have nine liters. The nouns are all right in themselves but tend to guide our thoughts to the idea that a human being is a bag with an inside and an outside and that the bag contains a collection of items or qualities. In actuality, the actions that we call creative or brave or loving or competitive are relational. Every human activity takes place in context, in a certain time and setting. We all know of people, in real life or in fiction, who are brave at one moment and cowardly at another, people who are imaginative at one moment and dull at another. That is because these words do not describe inherent traits; they describe actions and decisions. People who have experienced fear might be labeled cowardly, or simply shy, by their peers and by themselves. If we accept this label and reinforce it, reify it, we convince ourselves more and more that the label defines us. Then we really are trapped by it, boxed in by language. Instead we can work to understand that we do not exist as static entities who always respond the same way to similar scenarios. We are dynamic, ever changing, and we have the choice in any given moment to be who we think we should be.

What can we learn from improvising? There is no “takeaway” that we can carry with us. There are, rather, some things we can leave behind, including the fixed idea of self as a sack with certain contents. Qualities of interaction are not things we possess; they are activities that we manifest in a particular place and time. We can see people without captions; we can allow music to unfold without attaching labels to it. We can allow our own stories to play out in the complexity of real life.

• • •

I am not a writer — I am writing. Yesterday I was not writing. I was doing dreary errands and engaging in distraction, entertainment, and memories. It is natural to write sometimes and not to write at others. Rimbaud wrote, and then he didn’t write. But if I stick with nouns — “I am a writer” — then a frustrating day like yesterday would have to be framed as “writer’s block” — a disease for which I seek a cure. By treating activities or states as though they were solid objects, we buy a world of trouble. We automatically say, “I have a disease,” “I have a condition.” This metaphor works marvelously well in the case of infectious diseases, where a disease vector like a bacterium, virus, or toxin has indeed invaded our bodies. But too frequently it is extended to contexts in which the metaphor does not apply. Pharmaceutical industries and many other industries, of course, love this metaphor of having. We are so easily sucked into conceiving complex relationships and systems in the framework of problem-and-solution.

We are trained to say, I am this, I am that. We may spend much of our day playing music, driving a delivery truck, treating patients in a hospital, forecasting the weather, investigating crimes, but to be pinned down and solidified by a professional identity leaves out the immense variety of every human life. We can make the jump into thinking systemically, to realizing that we are verbs, not things.

• • •

David Chadwick, one of the priests at San Francisco Zen Center, asked Shunryū Suzuki, the master who founded the center, if he could summarize Buddhism in one sentence. This was a cocky, tongue-in-cheek question because Suzuki-roshi had many times urged his students not to make a thing out of Buddhism. So David expected that Suzuki would refuse to answer his question. But Suzuki did answer. He said, “Everything changes.”

• • •

I remember driving in the mountains above Los Angeles with my son Greg when he was one and a half. He was at the stage when language was flooding in, ceaselessly making connections. We had a long view of the winding road heading up the hillsides and open chaparral. Every time a driver passed us on the road, Greg, sitting behind me, strapped into his car seat, pointed and shouted, “Car! Car! Car!” Then to my alarm he began to wiggle out of his restraints like Houdini, the better to stand up in the back seat and shout, “Car! Car! Car!” with a musical, rising tone, speaking with his whole body, from the feet up. Babies are like this. Beyond the obvious usefulness of language, there is the joy of naming, the power of crying out, the excitement that seems to jump from the pointing finger, the dance of light between eye and object.

That beautiful act of naming is what eventually undoes — for many of us — the freshness of our baby perceptions. We learn the labels: that’s a Ford, that’s Malibu Canyon, that’s a chair, that’s a symphony, that’s money. That’s a person of a certain ethnic group or religion. Having the power to name and categorize, we forget the fascination of those individual experiences, and the newness of each perception, the newness of each face that confronts us. We stop looking deeply at what is in front of us. We adopt the jaded, all-knowing view of the professional and dismiss what is in front of us because we already know what it is — I’ve seen it all, I know it all. Often we see people’s creative urges stopped in their tracks by gatekeepers so sure of what they know that there is no room for what they don’t. Every profession — musician, publisher, professor, police detective, physician, builder — has built up expertise, necessary for functioning in the world. Yet every form of expertise produces a counter-condition in which we become limited by the filters. We know what’s right; we know what works; we know. And therefore we sometimes cannot see what is right in front of our noses.

Keeping that balance between expertise and freshness is the practice of a lifetime. Each of us can be the baby fascinated by the new things in the world, ready to receive. If you have learned to play the violin very well, your technique can become a jail. But if you retain your childhood capacity to use the instrument as a toy, and couple that with your expertise, your technique can become anything you want it to. The baby who shouted, “Car!” was not the same baby the next day, and the day after that. The baby is a continuous transformation of moment-to-moment action: growth, evolution, change, destruction, renewal. We passed a stream of shiny cars in the canyon one minute, and moments later passed a junk heap of rusted relics.

And so the famous words of Suzuki-roshi: “If your mind is empty, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”

• • •

One evening, over a Mexican dinner in Santa Cruz, California, Gregory Bateson told me for the first time of Anatol Holt’s idea for a bumper sticker that said stamp out nouns. I was twenty-two and he was sixty-nine. We spoke of how difficult it is to change our way of thinking, to see the world as context and process rather than a set of fixed entities. By way of conclusion, he said, “You know, there is no substance,” grinning with the irony of saying this while he, an enormous shaggy old Englishman at six foot five, was looming over me with a beer in his hand. A lot of substance, yet teaching me that substance was only the current appearance of an impermanent, ever-changing, interactive life. Stamping out nouns is not a call for an exotic restructuring of language; it is an invitation to see and speak about the world as active process. We can use the terms and procedures of daily life without getting stuck in them. Then we can use language with pleasure and integrity. The reduction of anything, including activities we most love, into commodities and objects, the tendency for the lava of life to be frozen into stone by language and thought, means that we need to stamp out nouns as a continuous practice. To be a verb is a full-time occupation, like breathing.

Maury Maverick’s grandfather was Samuel Maverick, after whom the word maverick was coined. Samuel Maverick, unlike other Texas cattlemen, did not brand his cattle. Thus, a maverick was an unbranded cow or steer. The unbranded, the unlabeled, is a significant concept for us today, when business interests are relentlessly trying to impose branding on us. Branding actually refers to the cruel procedure of using a hot iron to burn a logo into the skin of an animal — or in the days of slavery, a human being. Our right as free human beings is not to be branded. That is where improvisation in life and art meets our daily experience. Improvising means freedom from branding. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, not having thoughts planted in us by entities not of our choosing. Part of an improviser’s work is negative: stomping on nouns, stomping on dreams of polished perfection, stomping on preconceptions of how things are supposed to be. To what extent can that stomping be a dance, with its own shape, its own wild grace, its own life-giving awareness of what and who is around us? Stamp, stomp, squish. It is great exercise for the legs, the whole body, and puts a spring in your step. With twenty-six bones in each foot, twenty muscles, and more than eighty tendons and ligaments, the combinations and permutations, the fresh, invigorating styles of stomping, are nearly infinite.

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