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.
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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.
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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.
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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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To me, “good” is not how skillfully you do something you were taught, but rather discovering something within you in a way that is totally new, unexpected, surprising, and satisfyingly right.
— Rachel Rosenthal
The musician Johann van Beethoven had a talented little boy. A career in the arts was a bit dubious in the 1770s, as it always has been. There were a few superstars, but for most people music was a risky business. The elder Beethoven had in mind the recent successes of another talented child, Mozart, who traveled with his father and sister to dazzle the crowned heads of Europe. Little Ludwig van Beethoven was going to be the goose that laid the golden egg. So the father (in keeping with the pedagogical principles of the time) stood over the boy with a stick as he practiced, and whacked him on the fingers every time he made a mistake. Lest we think this abusive discipline is what made Beethoven a great musician, remember the thousands of just-average musicians who were taught in the same way. Or the thousands who might have enjoyed playing music but quit.
Nowadays we regard it as barbaric to use corporal punishment as a teaching method. But the shadow of that stick, whacking the child on his or her fingers, remains in other forms. We are taught to fear mistakes and to hide them.
