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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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
