Читать книгу The Art of Is - Stephen Nachmanovitch - Страница 17

Stuck or Sticky

I once heard the Zen master Dainin Katagiri speak of the importance of not being too sticky. I never knew if Katagiri was deliberately playing with language to give us a fresh perspective, or if it was just the way his Japanese-flavored English came out. Either way, this was a fruitful poetic inversion of our usual idea of being stuck. Moment by moment, each of us is attracted to certain things and repelled by others; we have fears and hopes, we entertain our ideas and the ideas prevalent in our society — and we find ourselves clinging to those ideas, following our attractions and repulsions. Concepts and passions can trap us like flypaper, or rather we ourselves are the flypaper. It is easy to see ourselves as stuck in a rut at work, stuck in a way of relating to friends or loved ones. Stuck in an addiction. Stuck in an artistic habit, writer’s block, speaker’s block, blocked friendship, a block in the stiff muscles of one’s back. A darting mind, or a mind sticking to repetitive thoughts, blocks us from sleeping or from acting. We speak of other people as stuck in prejudice, stuck in the past.

A musician I know said, “I was so stuck in my improvisations, rattling on and on in the same way, I could hardly play sometimes, I was getting so bored with it.” We have practiced a craft for years — this is the way to do it. We may want to try it another way, but we are stuck in this. We have dug a groove with all our sincere practice.

Then we feel like victims of circumstance; we are in a situation. But invert the relationship implied in the word, and we see ourselves as actively sticking rather than stuck. Stuck is a passive construction, not only of language but of a person’s entire reality. Sticky reveals that it is we who are doing the sticking, we who choose, whether consciously or unconsciously, to cling to the objects of our attractions and repulsions. Therefore we have the power to dissolve some of this glue.

• • •

There is an old story about two monks crossing a river. They meet a beautiful young woman who wants to get across but is afraid of the rushing water. One of the monks picks her up and carries her. When they reach the far shore, he puts her down, and she goes her separate way. A bit farther along the muddy road, his companion berates him for violating his monkish vows by holding a girl in his arms. The first monk replies, “I put her down at the riverbank. Are you still carrying her?”

• • •

Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, tells of being stuck by the roadside in the wilderness, his vehicle disabled because of a screw that has rusted in place. The screw was no longer a small, cheap, generic object like hundreds of others in the machine. This particular screw was an individual phenomenon that was worth exactly everything. The whole trip narrowed down to the problem of getting that screw out. As he investigated the machine, Pirsig realized he needed to face the mental stuckness that so often accompanies the physical. “Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.” To abide in and be able to tolerate such stuckness is one of the fruits of mindfulness practice.

A century earlier, Sigmund Freud arrived at his own method of mindfulness. In 1912 he wrote a paper of practical instructions for therapists. How does a doctor do psychoanalysis without getting caught up in his or her own predispositions? If the job is attending empathetically to the pain of many people, how does one attend to each patient without getting one’s own emotions stuck in their problems? And above all, how does one understand another human being without jumping to premature conclusions? Freud wrote, “One has simply to listen.” He goes on to say,

The technique is a very simple one. It disclaims the use of any special aids, even of note-taking, and simply consists in making no effort to concentrate the attention on anything in particular, and in maintaining in regard to all that one hears the same measure of calm, quiet attentiveness — of “evenly-hovering attention.” For as soon as attention is deliberately concentrated, one begins to select from the material before one. . . . This is just what must not be done. If one’s expectations are followed in this selection there is the danger of never finding anything but what is already known.

Our contemporary practice of mindfulness is exactly this evenly hovering attention: deliberate alertness, being in the present moment without judgment, allowing the experience to unfold without critical interference, not holding on to only what we already know.

In 1817 John Keats spoke of Negative Capability: “The ability to remain within Mysteries, Uncertainties & Doubt without the irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Negative Capability is the poetics of listening. It is a skill that can be cultivated through practice, and like many skills, lost again and found again.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, published at the dawn of 1900, Freud contrasted this open state of mind with self-clinging, critical reflection: “The whole frame of mind of a man who is reflecting is totally different from that of a man who is observing his own psychical processes.” Freud used reflecting to mean self-critical, discursive thinking and observing to mean evenly hovering attention. “In reflection, there is one more psychical activity at work than the most attentive self-observation, and this is shown amongst other things by the tense looks and wrinkled forehead of a person pursuing his reflections as compared with the restful expression of a self-observer.” If we wish to visualize Freud’s reflecting, look at Rodin’s famous sculpture The Thinker, with his gnarled, uncomfortable posture and tight brow. Rodin was inspired by Blake’s illustration of a brooding bird-headed man, looking pained and unbalanced, muscles strained. For a very different view, that of observing, look at images of buddhas and bodhisattvas, smiling, happy, and balanced, their backs relaxed and stable: breathing.

• • •

In 1996 my wife and I attended a week of teachings by the Dalai Lama in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. On this occasion His Holiness was under protection by the United States Secret Service. Normally Secret Service agents are guarding a visiting foreign president giving an hour-long talk on trade, military policy, or cultural exchange, and then they are off traveling to the next engagement. But here the Dalai Lama was taking five full days to explore the Indian philosophers Nagarjuna and Shantideva, whose writings in the first millennium remain the foundation of our modern ideas of mindfulness.

The Pasadena Civic is an ornate Art Deco building from 1930, gilded patterns festooning the tall walls of the proscenium. The Dalai Lama was surrounded by dozens of sitting lamas and monks in bright saffron and maroon Tibetan robes, as well as representatives of other Buddhist traditions, arrayed in concentric semicircles, a bit like a symphony orchestra. An enormous thangka painting hung from the rafters above them. Contrasting with this colorful display of people and artwork stood the men in black, at intervals around the back of the stage, with curly communicators tucked behind their ears. They stood there all day long, scanning this audience of three thousand people for the remote possibility of a weapon’s glint.

The Dalai Lama was speaking about being present to the minutiae of experience as a unified mind and body, about going to more and more subtle levels of consciousness, until we are fully awake and aware of everything around us. He was speaking of the simplicity and energy of a stable posture, the stability and inner quietude that enables us to listen, see, and feel clearly, to be able to act single-mindedly when other living beings need our help.

As the hours flowed on, I found myself fascinated by the Secret Service agents standing in the background. These men in dark business suits seemed to come from the opposite end of the universe. But they were actually demonstrating what the Dalai Lama was talking about. They were utterly alert, calm, observant, standing motionless for an hour at a time, after which they quietly exchanged places with each other to refresh their view. At the end of each day they seemed as relaxed as they had at the beginning. One day there was a man who was clearly not a “real” Secret Service agent; perhaps he had been pulled in from an office job. He was visibly uncomfortable, constantly shifting position, leaning up against a column. As demonstrated by this gentleman (by most of us!), it actually takes a lot of energy to stand still. Standing or sitting, not wasting energy with unnecessary effort is a skill that takes practice, which the experienced agents showed in their quiet way. They were able, as Henry Miller put it, to stand still like a hummingbird.

In Tibetan and Zen styles of meditation, one sits with half-shuttered eyes. In Japanese this is called fusoku furi, unattached and undetached. Not open to the public world, not closed into a private world. In this way we sustain concentration and stillness while remaining fully aware of our surroundings.

• • •

In 1980 my teacher Gregory Bateson was dying. He was in the hospital for three weeks, then the San Francisco Zen Center invited him to be there for what turned out to be his final week. Beyond the big hospital bed that had been imported, there were black-robed figures, young American men and women in long-term Zen training. Four of them would sit in meditation in the corners of the room, facing the wall, breathing slowly in time with Gregory, who had lung disease. They seemed oblivious, like human furniture, while friends and family came to visit each day, talking with each other and with Gregory. But the moment something was needed in the room, including some of the ugly things that accompany the dying process, the Zen students would pop up and do what was needed, instantly, carefully. Then they would sit again and disappear into meditation. The image of those Zen men and women came back to me sixteen years later as I watched the Secret Service agents, with their evenly hovering attention.

• • •

In medicine the most common errors are due to premature closure — arriving at an initial diagnosis that seems to fit the case but does not encompass a deeper investigation into all the phenomena and all the patient might have to say. As institutional pressures mount up on doctors to see more patients per hour (“productivity” is one of the most unfortunate buzzwords of our age), premature closure is implicitly encouraged. The physician too eager to fill in the chart from a set list of diagnostic codes will be less likely to see the patient.

How often do our well-intended efforts to fix things end up making them worse? How many of us have tried to fix a mechanical item with repeated, frustrated force and ended up breaking it instead? To remain present long enough without knowing the answer, to take the time to closely examine how the parts of the machine are connected, to respect its complexity, to perceive details and relationships that are not immediately apparent, can itself be a lubricant. To remain open-eyed and open-minded, while still retaining access to the technical information we have accumulated through our years of learning, is one of those balancing acts that comes under the heading of “wisdom.” Cherish peripheral vision. The activity of our nervous system, conscious and unconscious, is constantly parsing the signal-to-noise ratio. Yet signal and noise, figure and ground, need to change places from time to time. The ignored detail that seems to be nonsense or unimportant might be the crucial thing that pops up as danger, opportunity, or inspiration — playful, off-the-wall, improbable.

Psychoanalysts will tell you that the great practitioners don’t interpret. This is a funny statement coming from a discipline whose most famous book is The Interpretation of Dreams. To pause and allow listening to flower is an art that takes discipline and gives material a chance to develop in surprising ways.

• • •

The practice of intent listening, which we will encounter in a later chapter — paying attention to birds, to water, to industrial sounds, to the human sounds around us, to our partners in conversation — seems like the easiest thing in the world. But it is amazing how much we miss. Something else is always going on amid the endless tape-loops of consciousness. Remembering, repeating, and rehearsing clog up our ability to listen. We retell our inventory of hope, fear, anger, triumph, resentment, and jokes. Once I was taking the two-hour drive from my home in Virginia up to Washington, DC, listening, or trying to listen, to an audiobook. The CDs were divided into three-minute tracks. There was a segment early on, with an especially elegant sentence that I had vaguely remembered from reading the book long ago. I wanted to catch it and taste the words. But I kept missing it. I was thinking instead about a hurtful interaction that I had had with a close friend and colleague. While the recording was playing in my car, the tape-loop of my ruptured friendship was playing in my head, the same few rueful thoughts in different combinations and permutations. Everyone gets caught playing those old tapes about mother, father, ex-lover, ex-employer. In playing these tapes we bind ourselves up in resentment or regret. I decided to try listening to the novel as a simple mindfulness exercise: just get through a three-minute segment with total attention. But I could barely make it through a minute before my inner tape snuck in and captured my consciousness. Half an hour later I was still hitting the rewind button. After an hour I finally succeeded in getting through the three minutes of storytelling, but just barely.

In many schools of meditation, we first learn to steady ourselves by counting our breaths. Just breathe regularly, and count each exhalation, from one to ten, then start over again. If you lose count, restart from one. It seems simple to do this for a few minutes. But it can be quite challenging to get past the number three. Consciousness is often touted as the glory of the human race. Actually, it’s not so hot.

• • •

Cross your arms over your chest. Simple. Now uncross them and cross them in the opposite direction. Perhaps nervous giggles break out: we feel clumsy and discover that we have formed a lifetime habit of crossing right over left or left over right. To do it the other way around feels funny, strange, uncomfortable. We get comfortable with a certain way of doing or seeing, and that becomes the universe of possibility. Now think back to how many times in the past you’ve lit up with the realization that life could be so much better if you changed one habit — and then discovered just how disconcerting such change can be. To create something new, you have to unmake yourself to some extent. And that can be tremendously difficult.

Freedom to act in the moment — the capacity to improvise — can liberate us, but it also terrifies us. We are often afraid of our own ability to change, our own agility. A friend who had gotten divorced said, “It’s easier to keep complaining about my mother, my ex-husband. Then I can avoid taking the risk of asking that man over there to dance with me.”

In artistic production, we become comfortable in our habitual styles and methods. We can stick to these patterns forever and stay assured that we know what we’re doing or that we are producing a product people approve of. This is how we can become pigeonholed by our own success. As Rilke wrote,

we’re left with yesterday’s

walk and the pampered loyalty of an old habit

that liked us so much it decided to stay, and never left.

For the monk who won’t let go of the image of his partner carrying the girl across the stream, learning the rules and sticking to them provides stability and clarity in this confusing life. This is how one should behave. This is how music is played. This is how sentences are written. “This,” quoting the mantra of many organizations, “is how we do it here.” The this is comfortable. We know what we are going to find there. Thus, we get stuck in conservatism and in doing as we’re told.

Stickiness is not only a matter of stasis or conservatism. We can be sticky to the need to innovate or to appear to be innovating. At a music festival I attended, a fine avant-garde percussionist produced virtuosic sounds from his snare drum, reveling in extended techniques, rubbing the drumhead with jeweler’s rouge, kitchen utensils, rubber balls, and plastic tubing. He got wonderfully elongated moaning sounds from the drum. Then his fingertip flicked out and hit the drumhead, making a classic snare drum stroke. It was clear from his face that he felt he had made a mistake. He had made a conventional snare drum sound and therefore wasn’t being original. He quickly covered this over with more activity, in the way musicians learn to distract attention from accidents. Was it uncreative to play a recognizable, traditional sound?

Bruce Lee, the great martial artist, developed what he called “the style of no style.” He was the first to do mixed martial arts, taking the best from all styles but not adhering to any particular school. Knowing about many disciplines, he would not be confined to any of them but do what was needed according to circumstance. Following the Tao Te Ching, he urged his students to be like water, yielding, shifting in form, able to penetrate everywhere.

• • •

Around 1660 Pascal said that the root of human unhappiness was our inability to sit still in a room. A recent series of studies showed that some people would rather give themselves electric shocks than spend a few minutes sitting quietly alone. Men are more likely than women to prefer electric shock to stillness. People feel impelled to skitter around, searching for entertainment or conflict. From this discomfort we generate quarrels, wars, dramas domestic and political. If we are afraid to be alone with stillness and uncertainty, life will be an endless quest for in-flight entertainment. Suffering or feeling wounded can be a mighty entertaining distraction.

The neurologist Charles Limb recorded functional MRIs of the brains of musicians while they were improvising, then again while they were playing set compositions, and compared the two. The improvising brains showed a suppression of areas involved in critical judgment and fight-flight responses. People are afraid to be patient with their own creativity, to tolerate (and enjoy!) the ambiguity of exploration. Our impulse is to drown it out with criticism. We learn this habit early. I was in the hardware store looking for a tool. Next to me were a mother and her seven-year-old son. The boy picked up a strap wrench and excitedly told his mom about four interesting structures he could make with it. The mom dismissively explained to him why each one was not possible. I did not want to interfere, but I found a couple of his ideas remarkably good. The boy put down the wrench and stopped talking.

The critical faculty is vital — in its place. Edit a paragraph after you write it, not beforehand. Otherwise you will write nothing.

• • •

When thinking calms down, even a little bit, sound wakes up.

— William Allaudin Mathieu

In physics the term relaxation time refers to the return of a perturbed system to equilibrium. A weight hanging from a string is perturbed by you or me pushing it. Relaxation time is the interval required for the pendulum to stop swinging. If the pendulum is being pushed by you and me and other people, it will jiggle in many directions and take longer to stop. When a pendulum has finally come to rest, you can choose deliberately to poke it with your finger, imparting a clear, beautiful movement to it. If you poke it too soon, while the pendulum is still perturbed from its previous movements, the result will be random agitation.

In this pendulum we see the connection between effective improvising and contemplative practice, the mind in a meditative state versus the mind in a state of agitation.

Imagine the pendulum swinging, buffeted by forces that seem to come from the outside. Contemplative practice allows us time for that agitated system to settle down. We begin to listen, to our own voice as well as to outside sounds. Only then can we become active again, and from this calm, produce an improvised gesture. In doing so, we balance two seemingly opposite movements: acting without hesitation and remaining still long enough for perception to dilate and take in the unknown. With evenly hovering attention, we learn that our creative efforts, or our efforts in managing the problems of everyday life, are part of an interconnected system that cannot remain fixed and knowable.

• • •

Sticking is an activity. We do it, or hold back from doing it. F. M. Alexander discovered, by experimenting on himself, ways to recognize how we stiffen muscles, hold old patterns in place, and limit the good use of our body. He spoke of practicing inhibition, that is, recognizing the habit of sticking and choosing not to do it rather than feeling our pains and habits as impediments imposed from the outside. This practice became known as the Alexander Technique. Cultivating physical practices, athletic or artistic, or standing relaxed and alert like those Secret Service agents, we discover muscles that are addicted to perpetual contraction. Involuntary contractions of voluntary muscles represent energy that is wasted rather than focused on what we desire to do. As we sit still on the floor for fifteen minutes, tight leg muscles relax into stretch, becoming longer, softer, more flexible. Thus it is with thoughts, emotions, breath. Thoughts and fears that were tight and worrisome recede. We manifest a steadiness of body and mind that is hard to disrupt. The relaxation response needs time to work. When we do that silent work, our capabilities expand. The natural activity of muscles is variation — holding, moving, keeping still, letting go; alternating rhythms of contract, relax, sustain, release.

Every practice incorporates this component: warming up, tuning up, stretching out, being patient while mind and body quiet down a bit and make room for concerted action and response. Musical practice often begins with playing long, slow tones, simple things, finding and saying hello to your fingertips, hands, shoulders, arms, back, legs, feet, saying hello to sound. Even in everyday conversation, we have these warm-ups: the polite introductions and recitations of formulaic dialogue — hello, how are you, fine — which seem so silly and repetitive to children. Yet people need a period of time to become present to each other through those little rituals.

Thus, some form of meditation, however we conceive of it, is profoundly useful in the practice of any art. Allow that perturbed pendulum to arrive back at the center. Take ordinary, everyday perceptions. Dial their intensity up and down. Visualize a knob, as on an electronic device, at whatever location your right hand currently occupies. Turn the dial up and down on intensity, contrast, tone, color, compression, or expansion of the difference between loud and subtle. Increase and decrease the range of sensitivity. Dial up the spectrum between fine focus and broad view. Dial in sounds or smells, the details of rooms or landscapes, and then dial out again to a larger context. Dial into touch and proprioception. Close your eyes and know where your hand is, and how it is moving. You know how much something weighs by holding it. Dial down the internal dialogue and superfluous brain buzz, like an engineer dialing down the gain, until attention floats lightly. Allow the agitated pendulum to come to rest; then set it gently swinging once more.

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