Richard Thompson is one of my musical heroes, and one of my favorite songs of his is “Let me Ride on the Wall of Death One More Time.” (If you haven’t heard this, go directly to iTunes.)
Literally, the “Wall of Death” term has two meanings that I know of. One is a particularly violent kind of mosh-pit activity in which two groups ram violently into each other in a sort of homicidal Red Rover move. The other, which I assume Richard Thompson is referring to, is a motorcycle stunt ride that is basically like driving around the inner side walls of a giant barrel at a 90 degree angle to the gravitational pull of the earth. Thompson, with his master-craftsman songwriting, transforms the adrenaline rush of the stunt ride into a powerful Zen metaphor for…well, basically for getting up in the morning.
Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
You can waste your time on the other rides
This is the nearest to being alive
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death
You can go with the crazy people in the Crooked House
You can fly away on the Rocket or spin in the Mouse
The Tunnel Of Love might amuse you
Noah's Ark might confuse you
But let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death
On the Wall Of Death all the world is far from me
On the Wall Of Death it's the nearest to being free
Well you're going nowhere when you ride on the carousel
And maybe you're strong but what's the good of ringing a bell
The switchback will make you crazy. Beware of the bearded lady
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death
Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
Oh let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
You can waste your time on the other rides
This is the nearest to being alive
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death
Let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death…
In the last 33 days, I have played music in China, where I saw mind-blowing gardens, stood in the Cold Mountain Temple, walked through Tienan’men Square, and climbed the Great Wall (not to be confused with the Wall of Death, unless you ask my shaking legs). I have come back home and been sick for four days (probably the salmonella-tainted tomatoes the news media are all panicking about). I have taught and performed at the most intense and incredible Zoukfest ever, during which I met Andy Irvine, one of my other great musical heroes, and had the great good fortune to sit 20 feet away from him while he gave two performances that moved my heart to tears. I have, with our medieval group Altramar, learned, rehearsed, and recorded the most technically demanding ars subtilior medieval piece I’ve ever had to lay down on a CD. (Yes, I am going to write about all these things in this and in subsequent posts; this is the preamble.)
I have no idea how all this happened in 33 days, unless there was some sort of wrinkle in the space-time continuum – a phenomenon that seems to happen more and more frequently these days, as if everyone is trying to jam 4 lives into one incarnation. It ain’t over yet, either, as we can see from next month’s itinerary: Zoom back up to 7000 feet to see my Taos buddies. Fly to Bloomington to honor the tenth anniversary celebration of the monastery where my Tibetan teachers live. Fly to Massachusetts to visit my family. Go to New Hampshire and attempt to learn how to play the gamba by flinging myself into a group of people who can already do it and brandishing a bow with unabashed ineptitude. In between all of this I will be studying like mad to take doctoral qualifying exams in September.
You can waste your time on the other rides…
It’s been an interesting week. The full moon on Wednesday marked the high point of Saka Dawa, the Buddhist observance of the Buddha’s Enlightenment. This celebration changes a bit from year to year due to the lunar calendar, but it’s usually in the late spring-early summer; and the full moon day has the strongest energy. It is said, in Tibetan Buddhist lore, that any karma you accrue in and around this day is magnified a hundred thousand times.
What did I do on Saka Dawa? I played music, which is not surprising, since it’s what I do; but it wasn’t just like any other day. Coyotebanjo and I were joined this week by our comrades J and D from the medieval ensemble Altramar. We all founded this group together in 1991, and in those intervening 17 years we have made 8 CDs and played concerts from New England across to the Midwest, South, California, Pacific Northwest… and over to the other side, to Ireland, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. Since around 2001, when the last of us left Bloomington, it’s been a lot more difficult to do frequent projects, and our last CD was released in 2003, before the record company’s demise. And while the three of us who settled in Texas have done concerts together since then, it’s been a very long time since all four of us were in the same room, never mind recording anything together, although we’ve had a new project in the pipeline for quite awhile now.
But something unexpected came along to kick-start us into gear: an invitation by our dear friend and mentor, the brilliant and highly-respected musicologist Peter Burkholder, to record some pieces for the forthcoming new edition of the companion CDs to the Norton Anthology of Western Music.
Now, I have to explain that this is a pretty big deal, at least to a bunch of music history nerds like ourselves. (To give you an idea, when I told the good Doctor Masbrow, our friend, colleague and Paragon of Irish Pardessus de Viol, that we had received the call to do this gig, he mimed holding a telephone receiver up to his ear, saying in mock disbelief “Who is this, really?”) The CD Anthology is used by literally hundreds (maybe thousands) of university music classes around the world as a companion to a huge number of university music history courses. Young musicians and their instructors are going to be looking at the scores, studying for listening exams, and listening to YOU. So let’s be honest with our highly Unenlightened selves: this is serious ego candy. It’s also terrifying, because that sort of microscopic scrutiny requires a certain level of performance perfection, and even if you achieve that to your own satisfaction, the aforesaid musicians and instructors may decide that, as they say in text-message lingo, UR doin it wrong. And that, my friends, makes Big Ego very worried and scared (what with the threat of nonexistence and all that sort of thing.) There is only one remedy, and that is to perform music as if it is Not All About You. Considering how blatantly obvious this is, it’s shocking how difficult it can be.
Anyhow, on Wednesday night, Saka Dawa, we did the first recording session, beginning with a fun piece that all of us have been playing for years. That was a piece of cake, and Coyotebanjo and the rest of us completed recording with no problem other than wrestling a bunch of gut strung instruments into tuning submission.
The other two pieces, to be done by J, D, and myself, were quite difficult; one with a lot of subtlety and very high in my range, and the other full of early 15th century meter changes and high-velocity gnat-notes. Since we Altramartians live so far apart from each other, there’s not a whole lot of time to rehearse – we began last Sunday – and we have to rely on learning things individually ahead of time, and then applying our professional experience and skills to get us where we needed to in terms of ensemble, and get it pretty swiftly.
So, on Thursday morning, having been pleased with the results of the previous evening, my Altramar colleagues and I were riding to the recording studio in Acuff (a metropolis consisting of a mini-mart, a diner, cotton fields, several barking dogs, and one well-hidden recording studio.) We were a little apprehensive; in truth, we really needed one more day to polish both pieces…but we were scheduled, so off we went; nervous, adrenaline pumping, zooming along in our Honday CRV – which, incidentally, Coyotebanjo and I had bought from D, who had driven it down to us from Michigan to Texas.
On the way, I missed the right turn for State Road 40, banged the next right, and looped around down a short piece of dirt road. The somewhat hyperbolic name of this glorified cowpath – “Holly Avenue” -- cracked D up; I reminded him that half of Big Flat Place is named after its home-boy Buddy Holly. In a jiff, we were back on 40; the detour had probably taken about 6-10 seconds. We approached the junction where 40 crosses the ring road that encircles Big Flat Place. This spot was apparently engineered by someone who thought that a stop sign at the end of the ring road ramp would render it unnecessary for anyone cruising down 40 to be able to actually see another vehicle exiting the ring road ramp until said vehicle was virtually at the stop sign. In this case, the vehicle exiting the ramp was some Texas asshole in a two-ton gas-guzzling Suburban going approximately 65 to 70 mph off the ramp, through the stop sign, across 40, and back up onto the ramp headed in the opposite direction. We saw him do this from a slight distance; he was, by my estimation, about 6-10 seconds in front of us.
Six to ten seconds.
After screaming something abusive in the direction of the vacuum-formerly-occupied-by the speeding Suburban, I said to my comrades, “I guess it’s a good thing that we overshot Rte 40.” A moment of silence then followed, during which it sunk into our brains that the seemingly meaningless glitch of initially missing the turnoff had probably saved all three of us from dying instantly in a fiery wreck.
We rode in silence for about 10 minutes.
J said to me later that during the 10 minute silence, the thing that was going through her mind was a swift reassessment of the importance of this recording in the Grand Scheme of Things. I myself was pretty shook up, and tried to concentrate on just being calm and driving safely. Nevertheless, I found myself musing on the serendipitous “Holly Avenue,” and remembered that D, who had thought the name was such a riot, is from Clear Lake, where Buddy Holly’s plane crashed. In short, I got completely creeped out.
The session we did that day was difficult. I was hoarse and the energy wasn’t humming. The engineer, Alan Crossland, was fantastic as always – he is the soul of skill, patience, and cheerfulness – but I was feeling sorry for him because we three weren’t locking in. We did multiple takes for two pieces and mixed part of one of them, but ended up ultimately using stuff we would record during the following two days. Normally I would be upset by that, but you know what? I wasn’t – because I was with my longtime friends, finally playing together again since I don’t know how long, and we were breathing and not being extricated from the engine of my Honda CRV.
We did eventually get the thing right. The next two sessions had the results we wanted. I can’t say we went in there and breezed through them in one take (more like 7 or 8 for each piece, with a number of additional sonic band-aid takes, what with all the little details we were trying to get right). But we’re happy with the result.
And, it was wonderful and somewhat emotional to have the four of us together in the same place for a week. Coyotebanjo did the tenzo thing and spent hours cooking fabulous food for all of us. On Friday night, the other Altramartians joined me and Coyotebanjo at our regular Friday night Irish session, and to our great surprise and delight the fourth member of my other band – the Irish band, Johnny Faa – had driven up from Austin to surprise everyone. I had never been in the same room with all members of both of these performing groups that mean so much to me, and it was quite overwhelming.
It was inevitable, of course, that on the last evening we Altramartians sat around reminiscing about our teacher Tom Binkley and the Early Music Institute. Something then possessed us to dig out the VHS tape of a 1990 performance of the EMI performance of the medieval Carmina Burana (not Orff, but sections of music from the actual medieval Carmina Burana manuscript, a huge theatrical undertaking.) Only D, myself, and Coyotebanjo had been in the production, but ironically, J had been there to see it, since she was there that weekend auditioning for the program. I tell you, it’s a strange experience to watch yourself 18 years ago. Seeing the video, and so many people we hadn’t seen for years, unleashed a torrent of reminiscences, some sad, some happy, some hilarious. In the morning, we had brunch together at our favorite place here in BFP, and then J & D went back to their respective homes, he on a plane and she in her van. I miss them already – but I feel as though something has been set back into motion; something that has been stuck. The day after the full Saka Dawa moon, the planet Mercury ceased its retrograde motion and turned direct; in astrological language this means that the energy was very good for getting things “unstuck,” and I hope that’s true.
In the meantime, I keep thinking about those 6 to 10 seconds. The fact that music is not All About You somehow feels directly related to that: "You" could be gone in the blink of an eye, and then what?
On the Wall Of Death -- all the world is far from me
On the Wall Of Death -- it's the nearest to being free…
Who cares if the recording is perfect, or if someone disagrees with the way you articulated those 32nd note triplets? Music is about the energy generated by the people making it, and the energy created by whatever is happening between them, or between the makers and the listeners; and not necessarily about the makers themselves. It’s a vehicle for community and communal energy. It's far greater than the sum of its parts; and even if you’re the one driving the vehicle, even if you’re the one generating the energy, it’s not about You and it’s not Yours.If you’re a musician, that’s enough of a reason right there to do your spiritual practice: I’m convinced that the musicians who understand that it ain’t theirs are the ones who move us the most. But more about that in the upcoming Zoukfest post.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Thursday, May 15, 2008
The Midlife Crisis Show
Well…it finally happened. The clerk at the checkout counter asked me if I was 55, and would I like the Senior discount? No? Oh OK – gee I hope you’re not insulted. Sometimes I say that to folks and they get insulted. You’re not? OK, cool.
Aaaauuuuggghh!
When I was young, I used to think I would be one of those people who was really “together” and would grow old gracefully, contemplating my navel happily and learning how to grow roses. Hah. Instead, I’m spittin’ and screamin’, because I AM, along with everyone else on Earth, going to Get Old and Die, and that’s one TV show we can’t turn off.
When I turned thirty, it didn’t really bother me. (Having been a little freaked-out at 29, I was over it once 30 arrived.) When I was 40, I was so damned busy working my ass off to (not) finish my doctoral degree that I didn’t even notice the number as it flew by, except to briefly say “Shit! I forgot to have kids!” I had a cool radio show, I had a great medieval ensemble, and I had no idea that my father was about to die, or that all kinds of other hell was about to break loose.
But fifty kicked my ass. And three years later, it’s still kicking. I’ve kept the lid on this so far by theorizing that it’s mostly hormonal, since 50-ish is the diabolical alter-ego of 13. But I don’t think that’s the whole story, because this 50-crap happens to men, too. Gentlemen, it may comfort you to know that 50 year-old women also suffer from vaguely defined compulsions to suddenly acquire multiple piercings, a racing-green convertible sport BMW and a tattoo. Granted, we don’t so often run off with 25 year old guys…but it ain’t because of us. Twenty-five-year-old women are sometimes attracted to and fascinated by older men, but for most 25-year-old guys, a fifty-ish woman mostly reminds them of Mom, and if any fascination or attraction does occur, it mostly makes them feel a little bit Icky.
Forget about all this “Fifty is the new Thirty” crap. That’s just another slogan dreamed up by my generation, many of whom are clearly still experiencing the effects of too much weed. Calling 50 “midlife” is a kind of deranged denial, and there IS something about 50 that is different from 19 (or 30). Maybe it hits you one day when you walk up a steep hill and you have to stop for about 30 seconds when you get to the top. Or maybe it hits you one morning after staying up until 4 AM one night yakking with some friends, and instead of getting up the next morning and feeling like your happy and horny 19-year-old self, you feel like warmed-over 53-year-old crap. Or, if you are a female, you’re sticking your head in the freezer because your internal thermostat is kaput. Whatever the scenario, the result is that your physical body finally gives you a clue to something that you have never really truly engaged with, no matter how many times your Buddhist teachers said it to you: You Are Going To Die.
Yes, You. Me. Probably not today – but probably in less than another 50 years. Maybe in half of that.
For me this physical realization was definitely triggered by hormonal changes, and might have been intensified by the fact that I neglected to spawn anyone to carry my DNA forward. But I really believe it’s part of the reason that 50 is kicking my ass: since I really, truly felt this Great Truth for the first time, I have experienced an endless cascade of emotional states that surprise me and make me wonder if all this meditation and dharma study has had one iota of effect on my blithering yet overwhelming ego at all. And while my intellect instantly censors these emotional blips as either ridiculous or having no bearing at all in reality (whatever reality is), my physical and emotional reaction to these feelings is very real. So to exorcise some of these beauties, I offer to you, for your viewing enjoyment and in this terrifyingly public forum, The Midlife Crisis Show.
Episode 1: The “Washed Up” Syndrome. This happens on especially bad days. What’s the point in starting any new career paths? You’re 53 years old, for crying out loud. What’s the use of getting any new skills? You don’t really have enough years left to acquire them. (I told you these are ridiculous.) Finish your doctorate? At 53? Are you crazy? What for? You’re just going to die anyhow.
I didn’t say this wasn’t ridiculous. The fact that I am “just going to die anyhow” was true when I was 19 as well. In fact, considering some of my behavior at 19, the risk was probably substantially higher.
I’ve tried to figure out where all this absurdity came from, especially since I come from a family of Old Yankees who in their late 90s had to be physically stopped from doing things like abandoning their walkers in order to clear the wind-fallen large branches off their lawn. Is it because I come from a small blue-collar town where a lot of people spent thirty years desperately waiting to retire, and where too many of them promptly died within 5 years of meeting that milestone? My father could not wait to retire, after 40 years of hurling cement blocks and drum kits around. But, at exactly the same age I am now, he decided to start playing the saxophone-- the instrument he wanted to play as a kid, but didn’t because his parents couldn’t afford it. He got remarkably good at it: the bebop idiom was already in his ears, and all he had to do was teach his fingers how to play what he had already heard in his mind. And yet every time I think of this, my emotions go straight to the fact that just 4 years after he finally was able to retire and spend all his time playing that sax or flying his radio-controlled airplanes, f****** cancer put an end to it. I don’t know why I can’t just say “Isn’t it wonderful that in the last decade and a half of his life he found these things he really loved to do?” Instead, I find myself thinking why the hell should I learn how to play the viola da gamba? I’m just going to die anyhow.
Episode 2: I’m Going to Do All The Stuff I Never Did and Change My Life. This is the opposite extreme, which happens on good days. I’m going to travel to this place and that place, write the following 12 books, learn to play that damned gamba, make at least a dozen more CDs, get a summer house in New England, teach workshops on Music and Spirituality, lose thirty pounds, blah blah blah. And in fact, there is absolutely NO reason why I can’t do those things – I refer you to the 98 year old Yankees cited above, and the 101 year old Tuscans on the other side of the double helix – but this enthusiasm is often short-lived, because, after all, I have to go to work like everyone else and put money in my feeble IRA and pay my mortgage and, oh yeah, I’m just going to die anyhow.
Episode 3: Do These Bifocals Make My Butt Look Big? One of the more curious manifestations of this 50 thing is a sudden obsession with the fact that one will inevitably lose whatever physical attractiveness one has managed to muddle through life with. I must say, it’s a strange obsession for a person who spent most of her life wearing jeans and baggy black sweaters, refusing to spend more than 5 minutes on any given hairstyle, chowing chocolate chip cookies with little regard for their effect on the posterior view of said jeans, and regarding parking-in-the-next-lot-over-from work as “exercise.” The obsession manifests in extremes which swing madly from buying nice clothes and begging the dermatologist to fry off the sun-spots on one’s face, to weeping because no matter what you do, you still look 50, and there’s no turning back. There is no way to reach 90 without looking at least 80, so why panic? I regularly see older people whom I consider extremely attractive; so what’s the deal? What makes me think I will scare small children? It’s a complete ego trip, really, but knowing that doesn’t seem to stop the emotional reaction (although it can sometimes show me the humor in it.)
Episode 4: Things That Make Me Unhappy. It somehow feels imperative to Fix All of These Things Now. This is partly because You’re Going to Die, but partly because because God Forbid you should live another forty years and still be made unhappy by these anathemae, whatever they may be. This particular episode contains a variety of regular sketches, such as 1) The Place I Live Sucks; 2) No One Appreciates What I Do and its sinister variation, I Actually Have No Idea What I’m Doing; 3) My Partner Must Think I’m An Idiot (this plays well with the unattractive obsession outlined above); and 4) Christ, I Have Made So Many Stupid Decisions. These recur during the course of a day like a bunch of happy little Baroque ritornelli. It is basically the Eight Worldly Dharmas (gain and loss, praise and blame, happiness and unhappiness, etc.) on hyperdrive. Alas, this burning need to fix everything that makes one unhappy (rather than fixing your Self) leads to…
Episode 5: Emotional Panic. This sometimes also occurs for no apparent reason. People love to blame this on hormones too, but it also happens when you prepare to read the annual letter from the mammography lab, so I suspect it’s connected to the You Gon’ Die syndrome. The anxiety sometimes happens when one forgets the name of someone one has known for years, or one can’t remember what you call that utensil that people use to eat soup. (My mother tells me that this last thing is hormonal and will go away, only to return for good in another 20 years or so; thanks Ma.) But it’s not just physical stuff. The panic sometimes creeps up when one ponders some unrealized dream that is now unlikely to be realized, or more likely (for me) when I ponder something I’ve done or said (or didn’t do, or didn’t say) that I regret with great force.
The truth is, for both fifty-ish men and women, the only thing that would really make us feel any better about ourselves would be to lose 30 pounds, get some exercise, and find a satisfying spiritual practice, be it simple or complex. In fact, virtually every one of the above “episodes” could be addressed with one of the various Buddhist practices I have been taught. And perhaps they are somewhat effective – after all, I am writing a blogpost instead of driving endlessly around the Loop blaring “All Along The Watchtower” out of the sub-woofers. Wait – I do that too. No…who am I kidding? I’m in a Honda CRW, I’m usually on my way to the garden center, and I’m referencing Jimi Hendrix. I might as well tattoo “50” (uh, 53) on my forehead.
So what to do? Someone once said, live and work as if you were going to live forever, and do your spiritual practice as if you were going to die tomorrow. And as for that first Episode in the Midlife Crisis Show, The Washed-Up Syndrome, I give you a paraphrase from Julia Cameron’s wonderful book “The Artist’s Way,” in which she has a variation on the following question:
Q: What, learn how to play the piano now? Do you know how old I’ll be before I actually learn how to play it?
A: Yes – the same age you’ll be if you don’t.
And there it is, folks. Whatever it is, just do it. Remember Country Joe McDonald singing in the Woodstock movie?
"Welllll, there ain't no time to wonder why;
Yippeee! We're all gonna die."
Go to China, learn the gamba, get another degree, do Half-Handstand, buy the orange jacket. And when 55 does come, take the discount and Run.
Aaaauuuuggghh!
When I was young, I used to think I would be one of those people who was really “together” and would grow old gracefully, contemplating my navel happily and learning how to grow roses. Hah. Instead, I’m spittin’ and screamin’, because I AM, along with everyone else on Earth, going to Get Old and Die, and that’s one TV show we can’t turn off.
When I turned thirty, it didn’t really bother me. (Having been a little freaked-out at 29, I was over it once 30 arrived.) When I was 40, I was so damned busy working my ass off to (not) finish my doctoral degree that I didn’t even notice the number as it flew by, except to briefly say “Shit! I forgot to have kids!” I had a cool radio show, I had a great medieval ensemble, and I had no idea that my father was about to die, or that all kinds of other hell was about to break loose.
But fifty kicked my ass. And three years later, it’s still kicking. I’ve kept the lid on this so far by theorizing that it’s mostly hormonal, since 50-ish is the diabolical alter-ego of 13. But I don’t think that’s the whole story, because this 50-crap happens to men, too. Gentlemen, it may comfort you to know that 50 year-old women also suffer from vaguely defined compulsions to suddenly acquire multiple piercings, a racing-green convertible sport BMW and a tattoo. Granted, we don’t so often run off with 25 year old guys…but it ain’t because of us. Twenty-five-year-old women are sometimes attracted to and fascinated by older men, but for most 25-year-old guys, a fifty-ish woman mostly reminds them of Mom, and if any fascination or attraction does occur, it mostly makes them feel a little bit Icky.
Forget about all this “Fifty is the new Thirty” crap. That’s just another slogan dreamed up by my generation, many of whom are clearly still experiencing the effects of too much weed. Calling 50 “midlife” is a kind of deranged denial, and there IS something about 50 that is different from 19 (or 30). Maybe it hits you one day when you walk up a steep hill and you have to stop for about 30 seconds when you get to the top. Or maybe it hits you one morning after staying up until 4 AM one night yakking with some friends, and instead of getting up the next morning and feeling like your happy and horny 19-year-old self, you feel like warmed-over 53-year-old crap. Or, if you are a female, you’re sticking your head in the freezer because your internal thermostat is kaput. Whatever the scenario, the result is that your physical body finally gives you a clue to something that you have never really truly engaged with, no matter how many times your Buddhist teachers said it to you: You Are Going To Die.
Yes, You. Me. Probably not today – but probably in less than another 50 years. Maybe in half of that.
For me this physical realization was definitely triggered by hormonal changes, and might have been intensified by the fact that I neglected to spawn anyone to carry my DNA forward. But I really believe it’s part of the reason that 50 is kicking my ass: since I really, truly felt this Great Truth for the first time, I have experienced an endless cascade of emotional states that surprise me and make me wonder if all this meditation and dharma study has had one iota of effect on my blithering yet overwhelming ego at all. And while my intellect instantly censors these emotional blips as either ridiculous or having no bearing at all in reality (whatever reality is), my physical and emotional reaction to these feelings is very real. So to exorcise some of these beauties, I offer to you, for your viewing enjoyment and in this terrifyingly public forum, The Midlife Crisis Show.
Episode 1: The “Washed Up” Syndrome. This happens on especially bad days. What’s the point in starting any new career paths? You’re 53 years old, for crying out loud. What’s the use of getting any new skills? You don’t really have enough years left to acquire them. (I told you these are ridiculous.) Finish your doctorate? At 53? Are you crazy? What for? You’re just going to die anyhow.
I didn’t say this wasn’t ridiculous. The fact that I am “just going to die anyhow” was true when I was 19 as well. In fact, considering some of my behavior at 19, the risk was probably substantially higher.
I’ve tried to figure out where all this absurdity came from, especially since I come from a family of Old Yankees who in their late 90s had to be physically stopped from doing things like abandoning their walkers in order to clear the wind-fallen large branches off their lawn. Is it because I come from a small blue-collar town where a lot of people spent thirty years desperately waiting to retire, and where too many of them promptly died within 5 years of meeting that milestone? My father could not wait to retire, after 40 years of hurling cement blocks and drum kits around. But, at exactly the same age I am now, he decided to start playing the saxophone-- the instrument he wanted to play as a kid, but didn’t because his parents couldn’t afford it. He got remarkably good at it: the bebop idiom was already in his ears, and all he had to do was teach his fingers how to play what he had already heard in his mind. And yet every time I think of this, my emotions go straight to the fact that just 4 years after he finally was able to retire and spend all his time playing that sax or flying his radio-controlled airplanes, f****** cancer put an end to it. I don’t know why I can’t just say “Isn’t it wonderful that in the last decade and a half of his life he found these things he really loved to do?” Instead, I find myself thinking why the hell should I learn how to play the viola da gamba? I’m just going to die anyhow.
Episode 2: I’m Going to Do All The Stuff I Never Did and Change My Life. This is the opposite extreme, which happens on good days. I’m going to travel to this place and that place, write the following 12 books, learn to play that damned gamba, make at least a dozen more CDs, get a summer house in New England, teach workshops on Music and Spirituality, lose thirty pounds, blah blah blah. And in fact, there is absolutely NO reason why I can’t do those things – I refer you to the 98 year old Yankees cited above, and the 101 year old Tuscans on the other side of the double helix – but this enthusiasm is often short-lived, because, after all, I have to go to work like everyone else and put money in my feeble IRA and pay my mortgage and, oh yeah, I’m just going to die anyhow.
Episode 3: Do These Bifocals Make My Butt Look Big? One of the more curious manifestations of this 50 thing is a sudden obsession with the fact that one will inevitably lose whatever physical attractiveness one has managed to muddle through life with. I must say, it’s a strange obsession for a person who spent most of her life wearing jeans and baggy black sweaters, refusing to spend more than 5 minutes on any given hairstyle, chowing chocolate chip cookies with little regard for their effect on the posterior view of said jeans, and regarding parking-in-the-next-lot-over-from work as “exercise.” The obsession manifests in extremes which swing madly from buying nice clothes and begging the dermatologist to fry off the sun-spots on one’s face, to weeping because no matter what you do, you still look 50, and there’s no turning back. There is no way to reach 90 without looking at least 80, so why panic? I regularly see older people whom I consider extremely attractive; so what’s the deal? What makes me think I will scare small children? It’s a complete ego trip, really, but knowing that doesn’t seem to stop the emotional reaction (although it can sometimes show me the humor in it.)
Episode 4: Things That Make Me Unhappy. It somehow feels imperative to Fix All of These Things Now. This is partly because You’re Going to Die, but partly because because God Forbid you should live another forty years and still be made unhappy by these anathemae, whatever they may be. This particular episode contains a variety of regular sketches, such as 1) The Place I Live Sucks; 2) No One Appreciates What I Do and its sinister variation, I Actually Have No Idea What I’m Doing; 3) My Partner Must Think I’m An Idiot (this plays well with the unattractive obsession outlined above); and 4) Christ, I Have Made So Many Stupid Decisions. These recur during the course of a day like a bunch of happy little Baroque ritornelli. It is basically the Eight Worldly Dharmas (gain and loss, praise and blame, happiness and unhappiness, etc.) on hyperdrive. Alas, this burning need to fix everything that makes one unhappy (rather than fixing your Self) leads to…
Episode 5: Emotional Panic. This sometimes also occurs for no apparent reason. People love to blame this on hormones too, but it also happens when you prepare to read the annual letter from the mammography lab, so I suspect it’s connected to the You Gon’ Die syndrome. The anxiety sometimes happens when one forgets the name of someone one has known for years, or one can’t remember what you call that utensil that people use to eat soup. (My mother tells me that this last thing is hormonal and will go away, only to return for good in another 20 years or so; thanks Ma.) But it’s not just physical stuff. The panic sometimes creeps up when one ponders some unrealized dream that is now unlikely to be realized, or more likely (for me) when I ponder something I’ve done or said (or didn’t do, or didn’t say) that I regret with great force.
The truth is, for both fifty-ish men and women, the only thing that would really make us feel any better about ourselves would be to lose 30 pounds, get some exercise, and find a satisfying spiritual practice, be it simple or complex. In fact, virtually every one of the above “episodes” could be addressed with one of the various Buddhist practices I have been taught. And perhaps they are somewhat effective – after all, I am writing a blogpost instead of driving endlessly around the Loop blaring “All Along The Watchtower” out of the sub-woofers. Wait – I do that too. No…who am I kidding? I’m in a Honda CRW, I’m usually on my way to the garden center, and I’m referencing Jimi Hendrix. I might as well tattoo “50” (uh, 53) on my forehead.
So what to do? Someone once said, live and work as if you were going to live forever, and do your spiritual practice as if you were going to die tomorrow. And as for that first Episode in the Midlife Crisis Show, The Washed-Up Syndrome, I give you a paraphrase from Julia Cameron’s wonderful book “The Artist’s Way,” in which she has a variation on the following question:
Q: What, learn how to play the piano now? Do you know how old I’ll be before I actually learn how to play it?
A: Yes – the same age you’ll be if you don’t.
And there it is, folks. Whatever it is, just do it. Remember Country Joe McDonald singing in the Woodstock movie?
"Welllll, there ain't no time to wonder why;
Yippeee! We're all gonna die."
Go to China, learn the gamba, get another degree, do Half-Handstand, buy the orange jacket. And when 55 does come, take the discount and Run.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Fall Down Two Times
Blogging is an interesting art, because it’s not at all the same as journaling. Blogging is only like writing in a journal if you’re the type who doesn’t give a damn who finds and reads your journal -- and that would not be me. After a certain passage of time, I’ve either torched or shredded practically every journal I’ve ever written, in terror that anyone other than myself would actually get their mitts on it.
I must say, though, I do admire people like Coyotebanjo (coyotebanjo.blogspot.com) who can blog about fairly personal things in a way that not only seems perfectly appropriate, but often serves to articulate things that are simultaneously deeply personal and yet have a certain universality with the human condition. Poets can do this also, and great writers, and really, REALLY good songwriters. But not me. When I try to write something relatively personal in a blog, I usually end up trashing it. My apologies to Patti Smith, but -- Poets Blog for Somebody’s Sins, but Not Mine.
However, I am going to stick my toe in the water this time and write about something that feels personal to me.
The third Buddhist precept, after Don’t Kill and Don’t Steal, is Don’t Lie. Now, I don’t ever set out with the intention of lying, and I’m not talking about the lying that Compulsive Liar used to do on Saturday Night Live – “I found this hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk…yeah…on the sidewalk…yeah…that’s the ticket.” No, I’m talking about something else – I’m talking about feeling like a fake. (is this personal enough? Yikes.)
In the movie “Happy Texas,” the character Wayne Wayne Wayne (portrayed brilliantly by Steve Zahn) is an escaped convict who, through a series of ridiculous events, finds himself training a bunch of elementary school girls for their performance in one of those Texas abominations that is essentially a Little-Kid Beauty Pageant. One night when his partner comes home, he snaps and starts screaming:
You have no idea what it’s like to be in a room full’a those screamin’ little booger-eaters starin’ up at ya expecting ya to…know stuff!
Of course, university students are NOT screamin’ little booger-eaters (mostly). However, if you have a great CV and you studied with a bunch of famous people, then students – and faculty colleagues, and various other people whose paths you cross - expect you to…know stuff. All the time. Every day.
And I don’t always know stuff.. Some days I am OK with this, but on other days, I get that sinking feeling that comes when you suspect that everything you do is, as the Texans love to say, “More hat than horse.”
Does this happen to everyone? Are there other teachers out there reading this? Do you ever get a question from a student, and while your mouth is saying “Well, that’s not my area, but I would say…blah blah blah,” your brain is saying “Dude, I have no f----g idea.” Does this bother anyone else but me? Can you just go on your merry way, with the healthy conviction that no human being is required to know the entire contents of Encyclopedia Britannica, The New Grove Dictionary of Music, and Wikipedia? Or do you feel like a fake? I am reminded of the time that I was assigned a Teaching Assistantship that involved teaching the General Musicianship courses in the Young Recorder Player Program. When I pointed out the obvious (uhh, I don’t play recorder) I was told that I would be trained over the summer, and all I needed to do was be “one week ahead of the first graders.” (I just heard Quantzalcoatl go “Aaarrrrgggghhhh.”) Well, believe me, I have a lot of weeks when I still feel as though I am just about one week ahead of the first graders.
Here’s a series of questions for fellow student-ensemble directors (and I know at least a couple of you are reading this): What do you do when you’ve planned your semester’s music in advance, like a good conscientious director should, taking into account the general level of the ensemble for the last several semesters -- and then you have to juggle a bunch of changes that happen in the ensemble’s personnel? I know that some directors deal with this by having the veterans actually perform, and the others learn a bunch of music with the intention of playing it the next semester – and guess what? That’s what I should have done, and I didn’t – I changed a bunch of the repertoire. The result was that some people struggled and others were bored out of their minds. Bad directing.
So here’s the next question. If you screw up, how do you say “Oh well, I screwed up and I learned something” and then let it go? I cannot seem to do that. I have spent several nights staring at the ceiling until 2 in the morning. Why? Because my students depend on me, and I’m supposed to...know stuff. I have a goddam degree in this.
Perhaps I shouldn't be so hard on myself. For God's sake, I'm trying to sing, play recorder, crumhorn, medieval harp, 5 course lute, and percussion in the same concert, while keeping track of what everyone else is playing, or not playing. (Of course, this could be part of the problem; I'm reminded of the Far Side cartoon with the piano-playing elephant who's thinking "What am I doing here? I'm a flute player, for crying out loud.") But there's a history here; a history of being expected to just "know stuff." I studied with Tom Binkley, one of the aforementioned Famous People. Now, I dearly loved Binkley. I learned an incredible amount from him, and for a complete hagiography I refer you to Coyotebanjo’s moving tributes to him. But for all that he inspired us to become the early music practitioners we became, Binkley could also drive you nuts. He forbade any of the “Collegium Direction” majors to take conducting, because he didn’t want our directing technique to be sullied by all that modern stuff. Of course, other than having been the director of a small, mostly amateur church choir, I had no damned directing technique to be sullied, and by God I didn’t get any in that course. Tom’s course in “Collegium Direction” contained 2 people; myself and an absolutely fantastic flute player, an Italian grad student named Luca. The course consisted largely of creating concert programs (very helpful), being lectured weekly on how poor our knowledge of repertoire was (not helpful), cutting the occasional crumhorn reed (long forgotten), watching in terror while Binkley reached into someone's viola da gamba and moved the soundpost around to make it sound better (long remembered), and discussing how to make budgets with incredibly small amounts of money (also very helpful). However, the Collegium Direction course only included one hour of actual directing. (Not one hour a week - I mean One Hour.) That agonizing hour consisted of rounding up a bunch of non-early-music majors and attempting to teach them a piece from original notation while Binkley watched us make idiots out of ourselves. (Maybe it was two hours - did we do it twice? I've sort of blocked it out of my memory, the way you block the memory of the sound of your car crashing into someone else's.)
Fortunately, in the 15 years since then, I did learn a thing or two. Not by being the assistant director in any of Binkley productions – that task consistently went to the same vocal performance major (not a direction major) who was a particular favorite of Binkley’s, and by the time I reached the point in my degree program to produce my recitals, Binkley had passed away. No, it was just taking the bull by the horns and working with ensembles by myself, and learning by observing my teachers, and by doing. Both of my doctoral recitals consisted of concerts given by ensembles that I myself put together. The first one was a concert of medieval French music, and if I do say so myself, it was good. Of course, I had the luxury of casting that particular movie with musicians from the Early Music Institute, who were not exactly a dusty bunch. For the second one, I was actually given the opportunity to co-direct the IU Pro Arte Singers in a concert of Byzantine chant, and somehow, I did it. It wasn’t easy, since they were mostly my fellow graduate students and some of them behaved like Bart Simpson during the rehearsals (HA-haaaaa), but they were awesome musicians; and I had the help of my teacher Paul Elliott and the mind-boggling expertise of Dr. Tom Matheisen, and it happened. In fact, it was damned good.
And yes, I occasionally helped with other ensembles (and I have been a member of a medieval ensemble for over 15 years; but that ensemble is a democracy, and not a benign dictatorship the way a Collegium needs to be; however, I did learn how to put a program together.) Seventeen years of writing early music radio programs deep-sixed the “Poor knowledge of repertoire” problem. And then I found myself in a situation in which I had to help people use early instruments when there were no applied teachers for those instruments at the institution…in which I was expecting myself to direct an inclusive, audition-free ensemble in which some people are very advanced, others aren’t; some are very committed, some aren't; some are good readers, and some aren't; some learn their pieces, and some won't practice…and somehow, I still have managed to make around 20 early music concerts happen with a bunch of wonderful people, most of whom had never played early music before they met me.
And sometimes, I screw up.
Then I feel sad and frustrated, and all my fears about being a "fake" start bubbling up. But there is nothing that can be done about it, except to maybe swallow the ego, get over myself, and maybe blog about it and see what other people have experienced.
Fall down two times, get up three.
--- Zen Proverb
I must say, though, I do admire people like Coyotebanjo (coyotebanjo.blogspot.com) who can blog about fairly personal things in a way that not only seems perfectly appropriate, but often serves to articulate things that are simultaneously deeply personal and yet have a certain universality with the human condition. Poets can do this also, and great writers, and really, REALLY good songwriters. But not me. When I try to write something relatively personal in a blog, I usually end up trashing it. My apologies to Patti Smith, but -- Poets Blog for Somebody’s Sins, but Not Mine.
However, I am going to stick my toe in the water this time and write about something that feels personal to me.
The third Buddhist precept, after Don’t Kill and Don’t Steal, is Don’t Lie. Now, I don’t ever set out with the intention of lying, and I’m not talking about the lying that Compulsive Liar used to do on Saturday Night Live – “I found this hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk…yeah…on the sidewalk…yeah…that’s the ticket.” No, I’m talking about something else – I’m talking about feeling like a fake. (is this personal enough? Yikes.)
In the movie “Happy Texas,” the character Wayne Wayne Wayne (portrayed brilliantly by Steve Zahn) is an escaped convict who, through a series of ridiculous events, finds himself training a bunch of elementary school girls for their performance in one of those Texas abominations that is essentially a Little-Kid Beauty Pageant. One night when his partner comes home, he snaps and starts screaming:
You have no idea what it’s like to be in a room full’a those screamin’ little booger-eaters starin’ up at ya expecting ya to…know stuff!
Of course, university students are NOT screamin’ little booger-eaters (mostly). However, if you have a great CV and you studied with a bunch of famous people, then students – and faculty colleagues, and various other people whose paths you cross - expect you to…know stuff. All the time. Every day.
And I don’t always know stuff.. Some days I am OK with this, but on other days, I get that sinking feeling that comes when you suspect that everything you do is, as the Texans love to say, “More hat than horse.”
Does this happen to everyone? Are there other teachers out there reading this? Do you ever get a question from a student, and while your mouth is saying “Well, that’s not my area, but I would say…blah blah blah,” your brain is saying “Dude, I have no f----g idea.” Does this bother anyone else but me? Can you just go on your merry way, with the healthy conviction that no human being is required to know the entire contents of Encyclopedia Britannica, The New Grove Dictionary of Music, and Wikipedia? Or do you feel like a fake? I am reminded of the time that I was assigned a Teaching Assistantship that involved teaching the General Musicianship courses in the Young Recorder Player Program. When I pointed out the obvious (uhh, I don’t play recorder) I was told that I would be trained over the summer, and all I needed to do was be “one week ahead of the first graders.” (I just heard Quantzalcoatl go “Aaarrrrgggghhhh.”) Well, believe me, I have a lot of weeks when I still feel as though I am just about one week ahead of the first graders.
Here’s a series of questions for fellow student-ensemble directors (and I know at least a couple of you are reading this): What do you do when you’ve planned your semester’s music in advance, like a good conscientious director should, taking into account the general level of the ensemble for the last several semesters -- and then you have to juggle a bunch of changes that happen in the ensemble’s personnel? I know that some directors deal with this by having the veterans actually perform, and the others learn a bunch of music with the intention of playing it the next semester – and guess what? That’s what I should have done, and I didn’t – I changed a bunch of the repertoire. The result was that some people struggled and others were bored out of their minds. Bad directing.
So here’s the next question. If you screw up, how do you say “Oh well, I screwed up and I learned something” and then let it go? I cannot seem to do that. I have spent several nights staring at the ceiling until 2 in the morning. Why? Because my students depend on me, and I’m supposed to...know stuff. I have a goddam degree in this.
Perhaps I shouldn't be so hard on myself. For God's sake, I'm trying to sing, play recorder, crumhorn, medieval harp, 5 course lute, and percussion in the same concert, while keeping track of what everyone else is playing, or not playing. (Of course, this could be part of the problem; I'm reminded of the Far Side cartoon with the piano-playing elephant who's thinking "What am I doing here? I'm a flute player, for crying out loud.") But there's a history here; a history of being expected to just "know stuff." I studied with Tom Binkley, one of the aforementioned Famous People. Now, I dearly loved Binkley. I learned an incredible amount from him, and for a complete hagiography I refer you to Coyotebanjo’s moving tributes to him. But for all that he inspired us to become the early music practitioners we became, Binkley could also drive you nuts. He forbade any of the “Collegium Direction” majors to take conducting, because he didn’t want our directing technique to be sullied by all that modern stuff. Of course, other than having been the director of a small, mostly amateur church choir, I had no damned directing technique to be sullied, and by God I didn’t get any in that course. Tom’s course in “Collegium Direction” contained 2 people; myself and an absolutely fantastic flute player, an Italian grad student named Luca. The course consisted largely of creating concert programs (very helpful), being lectured weekly on how poor our knowledge of repertoire was (not helpful), cutting the occasional crumhorn reed (long forgotten), watching in terror while Binkley reached into someone's viola da gamba and moved the soundpost around to make it sound better (long remembered), and discussing how to make budgets with incredibly small amounts of money (also very helpful). However, the Collegium Direction course only included one hour of actual directing. (Not one hour a week - I mean One Hour.) That agonizing hour consisted of rounding up a bunch of non-early-music majors and attempting to teach them a piece from original notation while Binkley watched us make idiots out of ourselves. (Maybe it was two hours - did we do it twice? I've sort of blocked it out of my memory, the way you block the memory of the sound of your car crashing into someone else's.)
Fortunately, in the 15 years since then, I did learn a thing or two. Not by being the assistant director in any of Binkley productions – that task consistently went to the same vocal performance major (not a direction major) who was a particular favorite of Binkley’s, and by the time I reached the point in my degree program to produce my recitals, Binkley had passed away. No, it was just taking the bull by the horns and working with ensembles by myself, and learning by observing my teachers, and by doing. Both of my doctoral recitals consisted of concerts given by ensembles that I myself put together. The first one was a concert of medieval French music, and if I do say so myself, it was good. Of course, I had the luxury of casting that particular movie with musicians from the Early Music Institute, who were not exactly a dusty bunch. For the second one, I was actually given the opportunity to co-direct the IU Pro Arte Singers in a concert of Byzantine chant, and somehow, I did it. It wasn’t easy, since they were mostly my fellow graduate students and some of them behaved like Bart Simpson during the rehearsals (HA-haaaaa), but they were awesome musicians; and I had the help of my teacher Paul Elliott and the mind-boggling expertise of Dr. Tom Matheisen, and it happened. In fact, it was damned good.
And yes, I occasionally helped with other ensembles (and I have been a member of a medieval ensemble for over 15 years; but that ensemble is a democracy, and not a benign dictatorship the way a Collegium needs to be; however, I did learn how to put a program together.) Seventeen years of writing early music radio programs deep-sixed the “Poor knowledge of repertoire” problem. And then I found myself in a situation in which I had to help people use early instruments when there were no applied teachers for those instruments at the institution…in which I was expecting myself to direct an inclusive, audition-free ensemble in which some people are very advanced, others aren’t; some are very committed, some aren't; some are good readers, and some aren't; some learn their pieces, and some won't practice…and somehow, I still have managed to make around 20 early music concerts happen with a bunch of wonderful people, most of whom had never played early music before they met me.
And sometimes, I screw up.
Then I feel sad and frustrated, and all my fears about being a "fake" start bubbling up. But there is nothing that can be done about it, except to maybe swallow the ego, get over myself, and maybe blog about it and see what other people have experienced.
Fall down two times, get up three.
--- Zen Proverb
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Note from Self
So I’m making another futile attempt to clean out the box- and junk-filled room that is ostensibly my office, and I stumble upon a box that contains various memorabilia and a pile of old journals, typed out back in the day when we were too technologically primitive to keep our journals electronically and password-protect them with an obscure word in an ancient Khazak dialect.
Anyhow, I found an entry from ten years ago – yes, TEN years ago, and I thought I’d share them, especially since I still struggle with this stuff, and I figure I’m probably not alone.
So, from July 1998:
…I had an insight during yoga class, which is this: I couldn’t figure out why I would get to a certain point with a posture and then would feel this incredible resistance. Then suddenly I had an insight, which is that the point of resistance was actually a very specific moment at which I encountered “fear” as a physical presence held in the body. It was as if my body refused to go past that particular point. I had encountered a place where some psychological process was being expressed by the body as an irrational sense that I would snap or fall apart or somehow be harmed if I moved further into the posture. I discovered that if I worked with the breath and simply acknowledged the fact that this resistance might be nothing but fear – will I really be hurt if I move just a tiny bit farther, or am I experiencing fear? – that invariably my body would release that point of resistance and move farther into the posture. Leaning into and “through” the fear, as it were.
Now, thinking further about it, I realize also that my body was simply manifesting on the physical level a particular set of (life-long) psychological patterns. I also encounter incredible psychological resistance when I encounter my own personal “point of fear.” This suggests that the same tactic of breathing and acknowledging that the resistance might be fear, could result in the release of my “inability to go deeper into the posture,” or in this case, my inability to lean into and through the fear.
And, as with the postures, when one reaches that point, one is faced with a choice. One can either say, “I can’t do this,” and bag it, or one can lean into the fear/discomfort and explore whether or not there is in fact a place where one can move just a little bit farther. I’m willing to bet that doing martial arts brings up some of this stuff too, and possibly not as gently.
There are a couple of implications here that are very interesting to contemplate. One: this can be applied to quite a few things, from paying a scary bill to performance anxiety. Two: there is the implication that continuing to work through the physical resistance encountered in the body through yoga postures might actually activate some body-mind connection and help the psyche work through the resistance it encounters to various stressful stimuli.
It seems to me that this could have powerful implications for performers. We have to work through our fear and resistance with every performance (or at least some of us do), and all of us perform with our bodies…this may help with meditation, too. Certainly I have experienced the meditation equivalent of this resistance while sitting there with my mind spinning around like ten tornadoes. Perhaps there is a point of fear there, too, that prevents one from leaning into the complete chaos of one’s mind and breaking through to some kind of stillness.
Interestingly enough, the rest of the journal entry had to do with a particularly cosmic meditation experience that lasted about 5 nanoseconds, and then several paragraphs agonizing over bagging my pursuit of the doctorate (remember, this was 1998.) I finally decided that I needed to “let go of my attachment to the idea of completing the degree in order to complete it.” Interesting, since that is exactly what happened during the intervening decade (I gave up on it completely and now have found myself in the position of having to finish it). It’s also interesting to have found this piece of writing while I am uncomfortably leaning into the last stages of completing the topic proposal. If I finish it and turn it in, of course, I’ll have to face the next step, which is taking terrifying qualifying exams and then actually having to write a document. Will I really be hurt if I move just a tiny bit farther, or am I experiencing fear?
Anyhow, I found an entry from ten years ago – yes, TEN years ago, and I thought I’d share them, especially since I still struggle with this stuff, and I figure I’m probably not alone.
So, from July 1998:
…I had an insight during yoga class, which is this: I couldn’t figure out why I would get to a certain point with a posture and then would feel this incredible resistance. Then suddenly I had an insight, which is that the point of resistance was actually a very specific moment at which I encountered “fear” as a physical presence held in the body. It was as if my body refused to go past that particular point. I had encountered a place where some psychological process was being expressed by the body as an irrational sense that I would snap or fall apart or somehow be harmed if I moved further into the posture. I discovered that if I worked with the breath and simply acknowledged the fact that this resistance might be nothing but fear – will I really be hurt if I move just a tiny bit farther, or am I experiencing fear? – that invariably my body would release that point of resistance and move farther into the posture. Leaning into and “through” the fear, as it were.
Now, thinking further about it, I realize also that my body was simply manifesting on the physical level a particular set of (life-long) psychological patterns. I also encounter incredible psychological resistance when I encounter my own personal “point of fear.” This suggests that the same tactic of breathing and acknowledging that the resistance might be fear, could result in the release of my “inability to go deeper into the posture,” or in this case, my inability to lean into and through the fear.
And, as with the postures, when one reaches that point, one is faced with a choice. One can either say, “I can’t do this,” and bag it, or one can lean into the fear/discomfort and explore whether or not there is in fact a place where one can move just a little bit farther. I’m willing to bet that doing martial arts brings up some of this stuff too, and possibly not as gently.
There are a couple of implications here that are very interesting to contemplate. One: this can be applied to quite a few things, from paying a scary bill to performance anxiety. Two: there is the implication that continuing to work through the physical resistance encountered in the body through yoga postures might actually activate some body-mind connection and help the psyche work through the resistance it encounters to various stressful stimuli.
It seems to me that this could have powerful implications for performers. We have to work through our fear and resistance with every performance (or at least some of us do), and all of us perform with our bodies…this may help with meditation, too. Certainly I have experienced the meditation equivalent of this resistance while sitting there with my mind spinning around like ten tornadoes. Perhaps there is a point of fear there, too, that prevents one from leaning into the complete chaos of one’s mind and breaking through to some kind of stillness.
Interestingly enough, the rest of the journal entry had to do with a particularly cosmic meditation experience that lasted about 5 nanoseconds, and then several paragraphs agonizing over bagging my pursuit of the doctorate (remember, this was 1998.) I finally decided that I needed to “let go of my attachment to the idea of completing the degree in order to complete it.” Interesting, since that is exactly what happened during the intervening decade (I gave up on it completely and now have found myself in the position of having to finish it). It’s also interesting to have found this piece of writing while I am uncomfortably leaning into the last stages of completing the topic proposal. If I finish it and turn it in, of course, I’ll have to face the next step, which is taking terrifying qualifying exams and then actually having to write a document. Will I really be hurt if I move just a tiny bit farther, or am I experiencing fear?
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Enfant Terrible
Citizens of the Big Flat Place are constantly asking me if I have any keee-ids. When I say no, they often go the extra mile and say “Whaah?” (that’s “why,” for the uninitiated.) The real answer is way too long, but it has occurred to me that if Coyotebanjo and I had procreated, it’s altogether possible that some deadly mix of his super-articulate intellect and my Walter Mitty-level overactive imagination might have commingled with our mutual sarcastic sense of humor and tendency to befriend talking dogs.
Any more questions?
Any more questions?
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Suitcase In My Hand
All my life I have loved to travel. As a child I remember day-long “make-believe” games that involved traveling to faraway places (“Bye Mommy – I’m going to England.” “OK honey – be home at 5:15 for dinner.”) I made Pioneer clothes for my Barbie dolls, rigged up Conestoga wagons for them with cardboard boxes, pillowcases, and the old red Flexible Flyer, and hauled them in a Westerly direction. (Be careful what you wish for.)
I loved car trips. I loved trains (still do), and taking the train from Massachusetts to New York City with Mom is a very fond childhood memory. I loved taking the ferry from Woods Hole to Martha’s Vineyard.
My immediate family did not share this passion for travel. That was true to a degree that made me wonder if I was left at their doorstep in a reed basket. When I announced at the age of 22 that I was moving to Boston, my father was distraught and said “You might as well be dead!” (Boston was 80 miles away.) Fortunately, we all shared too many other traits to make the reed-basket theory viable. My guess is that wanderlust skipped a generation – but not because both of Dad’s parents somehow managed to get from Italy to New England. One could chalk that up to economic necessity. I think rather of my Mom’s father, Clayt, who in his youth attempted to cross the continent in a Model T -- until it stalled on a railroad track, whereupon Clayt and his friends pulled their sleeping buddy out of the back seat moments before the train sliced the car in half. For years I thought this was one of those highly-exaggerated or apocryphal family stories; however, after my grandmother’s death, I found the newspaper article documenting the event. I also found the obituary of my great-grandfather, Carl, who had lived in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Virginia, among others. Who knew?
When I was 26, a lucrative regular weekend gig gave me my first opportunity to save up a couple thousand dollars. My friends urged me to replace the red AMC Hornet that I was driving around, but instead, I went down to a travel agency and plopped down 400 bucks for a round-trip ticket to London. Never seen it, wanted to see it all my life. I had no particular reason to go, and no one to go with (boyfriend at the time wasn't interested, although three different male guitarist-colleagues offered, on separate occasions, to tag along.) I suspect my parents thought I was nuts; you might have thought I had signed on for a jog across the pond on the Niña, Pinta, or Santa Maria. But I went, and I discovered several things: 1) I am afflicted with an inner ear that makes flying or sailing without Dramamine literally impossible (unless you like throwing up for 6 hours.) 2) I was right; traveling was a blast. 3) Stonehenge is one of the coolest things on the planet.
All of this is a long buildup to the topic of this post, which is actually a rant in disguise. Topic of Rant: traveling is swiftly becoming a large pain in the ass instead of an enjoyable pastime. If you have an unlimited supply of money, time, and patience, you can still enjoy yourself; but if any of those are in short supply, well…spending one’s next vacation farting around in one’s own garden at home starts to look pretty good.
I’m talking especially about air travel, because that’s usually what I have to do, since I live in the American equivalent of Vladivostok. Seriously, are there any airplanes on the American continent that either take off or depart on time anymore? What is the deal? Actually, the deal is that the airlines have fewer flights because of economic necessity, so one thunderstorm or one mechanical problem causes a domino effect.
Then there is Security. Everyone complains about Security, but I’ll tell you, the “thing itself” is not the problem—it’s the absolute refusal of most Americans to either believe or observe simple sentence structures such as “no liquids or gels can be in your hand luggage,” or to figure out no-brainers such as “knee-high lace up boots are a bad idea if you have to remove them while 76 people behind you are late for their flight.” What the hell is wrong with people?
Today I got to Itty-Bitty-International an hour before my flight, only to discover that the flight was delayed and I’d have to take a different connection that was three hours later. Not that big a deal; I’d rather do that than try to catch the original connection in 15 minutes (ever try running from one end of DFW to another in 15 minutes? Not.)
So, I thought, this will be relaxed. I got ready to go through security. This means the following:
1) Check roll-y wheel suitcase. I am too short to hurl it into the overhead efficiently.
2) Unzip boots.
3) Stuff all extraneous adornments in satchel.
4) Take laptop out of satchel and hold in left arm with satchel and pocketbook.
5) Remove jacket and hold in right arm.
The above enables one to get to the security table, grab 2 gray boxes, plop the laptop in one, put the satchel on the conveyor belt, and dump all the other crap into the other box. This takes 10 seconds.
I am in line. There are about 20 people in front of me. First of all, there is a well-dressed lunatic talking to himself. Oh, excuse me – it’s not a lunatic; it’s a BlueTooth Guy. (See recent Blue Tooth Rant on Quantzalcoatl's blog). The overall effect of BlueTooth Guys is essentially the same as being in line with a street person wearing a thousand dollar suit. I get to listen to his conversation whether I want to or not. (Does no one realize that even the slight head-tilt used to speak into a cell phone makes the conversation less audible than shouting into the air with a Borg-like device jammed into your ear?) While I am attempting to ignore him, I notice that the line is moving very slowly. There is a very beautiful, well-coiffed and expensively-dressed young woman in line. She has decided that she needs to carry-on 2 bags and her suitcase. She is wearing a long and heavy wool coat with a fur collar, an assortment of scarves, mittens, doo-dads, and jewelry, and wearing boots. The security people, having obviously spied a certain well-known combination of demographic indicators, make her open her suitcase. Sure enough, she has enough “liquids or gels” in there to start an independent beauty salon. She is in the process of carefully putting all of them in the itty-bitty plastic bags that they provide at Itty Bitty International for people with Itty Bitty Brains who try to take their entire Bathroom with them on a 45-minute trip. They finally get her situated, and the person behind her, who has been standing there for 5 minutes watching all this, is told that she has to take her boots off. She had the previous 5 minutes to take her boots off, but was obviously hoping that the Nice Man would let her wear her rust-colored real-leather spike-heeled crumple-top 400-dollar specials through security, since they would take a very long time to pry off (they did.)
Honestly, people, what is the deal? And it’s not just the women – there was guy in his twenties who also ended up with a grey box full of itty-bitty-plastic bags full of toiletries. After this, you can almost understand why security people get all worked up when they see a guitar case – not because it might have an incendiary device, but because the instrument is likely to be stuffed in there with anything from 350 Travel Size Samples to a live puppy. People are nuts.
Then it’s time to get on the plane, which leads to the following queries:
Question: if you have an assigned seat, and if you don’t have a Stradivarius or a box of Blown Glass Figurines to put in the overhead, why do you need to rush the gate? Why are so many people so desperate to get into a Toothpaste Tube with Wings? Especially at Itty Bitty International, which is mostly limited to Itty Bitty Jets that are basically flying MRI machines. Once on the plane, there’s inevitably someone who farts around in the aisle and holds up 45 people behind him, while he struggles to get his too-big suitcase into the overhead, rummages for the seat-belt, searches the overhead for a pillow, puts his book in the seat pocket, starts to sit down, decides it’s too hot, gets up and takes his coat off, balls up the coat and tries to fit it into the 3 cubic inch space next to his suitcase, and in general does the human equivalent of that thing cats and dogs do when they circle around 25 times before lying down.
Question: This is for people who think that the airplane seat is a giant leather recliner, and that they are the only people on the plane. Do you HAVE to push your seat back so far that my 6 foot 5 inch husband gets his kneecaps dislocated? Ever consider LOOKING behind you to see if you might be slamming someone's laptop shut? (This happened to me today.) Does it cross your mind that shoving your seat back might eject the other person's dinner off their tray table and into their lap? Airlines should simply stop making seats that recline - it's one of the main causes of Air Travel Rage. I am relatively mild-mannered, and I have been tempted to push back as hard as I can (almost did that today during the Laptop Incident.)
Next item: survival tricks.
1) Earplugs. Never fly without them. Never EVER forget them on a flight longer than 4 hours. They are the best defense in the world against screaming babies, shouting cell-phone users, flight attendants who don’t know how to adjust microphone volume, seat partners who keep their iPods so loud that you can hear all the lyrics yourself, people who while away the time playing cards loudly with each other, and big genial Texans with barky laughs who spent the entire flight “visitin.’”
2) Potty time. Go to the bathroom before you get on the plane, and don’t drink a lot during the flight, unless you enjoy relieving yourself in a wildly vibrating gym locker. One of the natural laws of the universe is that turbulence will occur when YOU are on the airplane toilet - doesn't matter who you are or which plane you are on. This phenomenon is caused by a wrinkle in the space-time continuum.
If you’d like to put a little extra shine on these experiences, try taking some Dramamine. Everything is better in slow motion. Also, Dramamine combined with the judicious use of earplugs produces some Very Fine Psychedelic dreams, from which you generally wake with your head hanging at a 45 degree angle and your mouth open.
As I write this, I have just found out that my flight has been delayed two MORE hours. Could be worse – I could have been on the airplane sitting on the runway when this was announced.
Rant Complete. In the interest of leaving my dear readers on a positive note, I would offer the following “good things about traveling:”
1. That fact that the airport I use is an 11-minute drive from my place of work. This is a large contrast from the 65 minute drive I used to have.
2. The new B terminal at DFW. OK, so T-Mobile soaks you for wireless access: there are decent chairs, decent places to eat, an info desk, and Starbucks. (Starbucks are very useful for counteracting the Dramamine effect described above.)
3. Speaking of which: Dramamine. My paternal grandmother, from whom my father and I inherited the inner ear structure, told me that she hung over the side of the boat during the entire trip from Italy to America. I can’t even imagine this misery. I barfed from Boston to Indy once on a plane, and from Portsmouth to Halifax once on a boat, and I’m done with that. Better living through Chemistry.
4. The fact that it takes two hours to cover a distance that required 3 months and one of the aforementioned Conestoga wagons a mere 150 years ago. Above all else, we lose sight of this. No matter how much whining we do about the planes and security and the obnoxious passengers blah blah blah, we’re still not crammed together jouncing around below decks for 4 months. This reminds me of the recent cartoon TV commercial in which a very old man turns an electric light on and off and says something like “Why aren’t you all excited about this? When I saw this at the World’s Fair in 1904, I almost crapped ma' pants.”
Amen. Time to toodle over to the A Terminal.
I loved car trips. I loved trains (still do), and taking the train from Massachusetts to New York City with Mom is a very fond childhood memory. I loved taking the ferry from Woods Hole to Martha’s Vineyard.
My immediate family did not share this passion for travel. That was true to a degree that made me wonder if I was left at their doorstep in a reed basket. When I announced at the age of 22 that I was moving to Boston, my father was distraught and said “You might as well be dead!” (Boston was 80 miles away.) Fortunately, we all shared too many other traits to make the reed-basket theory viable. My guess is that wanderlust skipped a generation – but not because both of Dad’s parents somehow managed to get from Italy to New England. One could chalk that up to economic necessity. I think rather of my Mom’s father, Clayt, who in his youth attempted to cross the continent in a Model T -- until it stalled on a railroad track, whereupon Clayt and his friends pulled their sleeping buddy out of the back seat moments before the train sliced the car in half. For years I thought this was one of those highly-exaggerated or apocryphal family stories; however, after my grandmother’s death, I found the newspaper article documenting the event. I also found the obituary of my great-grandfather, Carl, who had lived in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Virginia, among others. Who knew?
When I was 26, a lucrative regular weekend gig gave me my first opportunity to save up a couple thousand dollars. My friends urged me to replace the red AMC Hornet that I was driving around, but instead, I went down to a travel agency and plopped down 400 bucks for a round-trip ticket to London. Never seen it, wanted to see it all my life. I had no particular reason to go, and no one to go with (boyfriend at the time wasn't interested, although three different male guitarist-colleagues offered, on separate occasions, to tag along.) I suspect my parents thought I was nuts; you might have thought I had signed on for a jog across the pond on the Niña, Pinta, or Santa Maria. But I went, and I discovered several things: 1) I am afflicted with an inner ear that makes flying or sailing without Dramamine literally impossible (unless you like throwing up for 6 hours.) 2) I was right; traveling was a blast. 3) Stonehenge is one of the coolest things on the planet.
All of this is a long buildup to the topic of this post, which is actually a rant in disguise. Topic of Rant: traveling is swiftly becoming a large pain in the ass instead of an enjoyable pastime. If you have an unlimited supply of money, time, and patience, you can still enjoy yourself; but if any of those are in short supply, well…spending one’s next vacation farting around in one’s own garden at home starts to look pretty good.
I’m talking especially about air travel, because that’s usually what I have to do, since I live in the American equivalent of Vladivostok. Seriously, are there any airplanes on the American continent that either take off or depart on time anymore? What is the deal? Actually, the deal is that the airlines have fewer flights because of economic necessity, so one thunderstorm or one mechanical problem causes a domino effect.
Then there is Security. Everyone complains about Security, but I’ll tell you, the “thing itself” is not the problem—it’s the absolute refusal of most Americans to either believe or observe simple sentence structures such as “no liquids or gels can be in your hand luggage,” or to figure out no-brainers such as “knee-high lace up boots are a bad idea if you have to remove them while 76 people behind you are late for their flight.” What the hell is wrong with people?
Today I got to Itty-Bitty-International an hour before my flight, only to discover that the flight was delayed and I’d have to take a different connection that was three hours later. Not that big a deal; I’d rather do that than try to catch the original connection in 15 minutes (ever try running from one end of DFW to another in 15 minutes? Not.)
So, I thought, this will be relaxed. I got ready to go through security. This means the following:
1) Check roll-y wheel suitcase. I am too short to hurl it into the overhead efficiently.
2) Unzip boots.
3) Stuff all extraneous adornments in satchel.
4) Take laptop out of satchel and hold in left arm with satchel and pocketbook.
5) Remove jacket and hold in right arm.
The above enables one to get to the security table, grab 2 gray boxes, plop the laptop in one, put the satchel on the conveyor belt, and dump all the other crap into the other box. This takes 10 seconds.
I am in line. There are about 20 people in front of me. First of all, there is a well-dressed lunatic talking to himself. Oh, excuse me – it’s not a lunatic; it’s a BlueTooth Guy. (See recent Blue Tooth Rant on Quantzalcoatl's blog). The overall effect of BlueTooth Guys is essentially the same as being in line with a street person wearing a thousand dollar suit. I get to listen to his conversation whether I want to or not. (Does no one realize that even the slight head-tilt used to speak into a cell phone makes the conversation less audible than shouting into the air with a Borg-like device jammed into your ear?) While I am attempting to ignore him, I notice that the line is moving very slowly. There is a very beautiful, well-coiffed and expensively-dressed young woman in line. She has decided that she needs to carry-on 2 bags and her suitcase. She is wearing a long and heavy wool coat with a fur collar, an assortment of scarves, mittens, doo-dads, and jewelry, and wearing boots. The security people, having obviously spied a certain well-known combination of demographic indicators, make her open her suitcase. Sure enough, she has enough “liquids or gels” in there to start an independent beauty salon. She is in the process of carefully putting all of them in the itty-bitty plastic bags that they provide at Itty Bitty International for people with Itty Bitty Brains who try to take their entire Bathroom with them on a 45-minute trip. They finally get her situated, and the person behind her, who has been standing there for 5 minutes watching all this, is told that she has to take her boots off. She had the previous 5 minutes to take her boots off, but was obviously hoping that the Nice Man would let her wear her rust-colored real-leather spike-heeled crumple-top 400-dollar specials through security, since they would take a very long time to pry off (they did.)
Honestly, people, what is the deal? And it’s not just the women – there was guy in his twenties who also ended up with a grey box full of itty-bitty-plastic bags full of toiletries. After this, you can almost understand why security people get all worked up when they see a guitar case – not because it might have an incendiary device, but because the instrument is likely to be stuffed in there with anything from 350 Travel Size Samples to a live puppy. People are nuts.
Then it’s time to get on the plane, which leads to the following queries:
Question: if you have an assigned seat, and if you don’t have a Stradivarius or a box of Blown Glass Figurines to put in the overhead, why do you need to rush the gate? Why are so many people so desperate to get into a Toothpaste Tube with Wings? Especially at Itty Bitty International, which is mostly limited to Itty Bitty Jets that are basically flying MRI machines. Once on the plane, there’s inevitably someone who farts around in the aisle and holds up 45 people behind him, while he struggles to get his too-big suitcase into the overhead, rummages for the seat-belt, searches the overhead for a pillow, puts his book in the seat pocket, starts to sit down, decides it’s too hot, gets up and takes his coat off, balls up the coat and tries to fit it into the 3 cubic inch space next to his suitcase, and in general does the human equivalent of that thing cats and dogs do when they circle around 25 times before lying down.
Question: This is for people who think that the airplane seat is a giant leather recliner, and that they are the only people on the plane. Do you HAVE to push your seat back so far that my 6 foot 5 inch husband gets his kneecaps dislocated? Ever consider LOOKING behind you to see if you might be slamming someone's laptop shut? (This happened to me today.) Does it cross your mind that shoving your seat back might eject the other person's dinner off their tray table and into their lap? Airlines should simply stop making seats that recline - it's one of the main causes of Air Travel Rage. I am relatively mild-mannered, and I have been tempted to push back as hard as I can (almost did that today during the Laptop Incident.)
Next item: survival tricks.
1) Earplugs. Never fly without them. Never EVER forget them on a flight longer than 4 hours. They are the best defense in the world against screaming babies, shouting cell-phone users, flight attendants who don’t know how to adjust microphone volume, seat partners who keep their iPods so loud that you can hear all the lyrics yourself, people who while away the time playing cards loudly with each other, and big genial Texans with barky laughs who spent the entire flight “visitin.’”
2) Potty time. Go to the bathroom before you get on the plane, and don’t drink a lot during the flight, unless you enjoy relieving yourself in a wildly vibrating gym locker. One of the natural laws of the universe is that turbulence will occur when YOU are on the airplane toilet - doesn't matter who you are or which plane you are on. This phenomenon is caused by a wrinkle in the space-time continuum.
If you’d like to put a little extra shine on these experiences, try taking some Dramamine. Everything is better in slow motion. Also, Dramamine combined with the judicious use of earplugs produces some Very Fine Psychedelic dreams, from which you generally wake with your head hanging at a 45 degree angle and your mouth open.
As I write this, I have just found out that my flight has been delayed two MORE hours. Could be worse – I could have been on the airplane sitting on the runway when this was announced.
Rant Complete. In the interest of leaving my dear readers on a positive note, I would offer the following “good things about traveling:”
1. That fact that the airport I use is an 11-minute drive from my place of work. This is a large contrast from the 65 minute drive I used to have.
2. The new B terminal at DFW. OK, so T-Mobile soaks you for wireless access: there are decent chairs, decent places to eat, an info desk, and Starbucks. (Starbucks are very useful for counteracting the Dramamine effect described above.)
3. Speaking of which: Dramamine. My paternal grandmother, from whom my father and I inherited the inner ear structure, told me that she hung over the side of the boat during the entire trip from Italy to America. I can’t even imagine this misery. I barfed from Boston to Indy once on a plane, and from Portsmouth to Halifax once on a boat, and I’m done with that. Better living through Chemistry.
4. The fact that it takes two hours to cover a distance that required 3 months and one of the aforementioned Conestoga wagons a mere 150 years ago. Above all else, we lose sight of this. No matter how much whining we do about the planes and security and the obnoxious passengers blah blah blah, we’re still not crammed together jouncing around below decks for 4 months. This reminds me of the recent cartoon TV commercial in which a very old man turns an electric light on and off and says something like “Why aren’t you all excited about this? When I saw this at the World’s Fair in 1904, I almost crapped ma' pants.”
Amen. Time to toodle over to the A Terminal.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Devaluations
Right around this time in each semester, most professors encounter one of the great joys of teaching: they receive the results of last semester’s Student Evaluations.
I have spent many hours with my colleagues talking about these documents, which are viewed by a great many professors as one of the great curses of our educational system. In theory, of course, they’re not supposed to be a curse. They’re supposed to help us assess and improve our own teaching ability, and provide students with a vehicle for honest and anonymous feedback that is a matter of public record — all of which, I think, is extremely important. In practice, however, everyone is scared to death that the information gathered on the evaluations is going to be used against them in some yet-to-be-determined way.
And does that happen? Oh, yes, it does. In some academic cultures, if there is a candidate for tenure who has rubbed someone the wrong way, or has unpopular political views, it’s extremely convenient to discover that he or she has some negative student evaluations. But let’s be honest: does this usually happen? Probably not, unless you have a department full of vipers, in which case you might seriously improve you quality of life by getting another job before you’re up for tenure (easier said than done, I know.)
There are, however, other issues connected with student evaluations that have nothing to do with ornery colleagues. They have everything to do with our own peace of mind as instructors. When in a rational, calm mood, or when trying to encourage a colleague who took a hit from one of these things, I have often expressed the opinion that student evaluations should be read as a “big picture.” If a hundred-fifty students think you’re great, and one thinks that you’re a total loser, you don’t probably need to be too worried about the one disgruntled camper. And, I believe that – I really do, when I’m Sittin’ in My Happy Place.
The problem is, if you love your students, you work your ass off more than 40 hours a week trying to stay on top of your field, you try to write interesting courses, and you meet with what seems like a zillion students a week, it feels like a kick in the teeth to read that one of your courses was “The Biggest and most Boring Waste of My Life Ever” (my favorite from the most recent batch.)
This does not hurt because I am worried about a tenure committee. I assume, because I am an optimist, that my committee will have already waded through the 149 positive comments before they got to this beaut. And, because I’m an optimist, I also believe that most people on most tenure committees, having gone through the process themselves, are completely aware that these anomalies are just that – anomalies. I also think that most people on tenure committees realize that there is a certain type of student for whom filling out a teacher evaluation form is akin to an opportunity to kick the cat because s/he’s had a lousy day. These students do not write constructive criticism. They do not write things like “I felt that the exams were too extensive to finish adequately in a 50-minute period.” Nor do they write funny comments that you can easily blow off, like “Less quizzes-more hot chicks.” (Yes, that was a real one.) No; they say things like “Biggest and most Boring Waste of My Life Ever” or “I hated this professor and I’m going to tell everyone I know not to take a class from him,” without giving one single reason why. (A friend of mine once got that one.) These students are not concerned about the consequences of their comments; in fact, they may have enough spite in them to hope that there are consequences. They are probably also oblivious to the possibility that a non-tenured professor might go through hell with a tenure committee because that student had a bad day and vented on a piece of paper.
Another favorite activity of this particular kind of student is to lash out via the numerical portion of an evaluation form. Given a set of statements and asked to rate the teacher in each area on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the highest, they skew the numbers by going right down the page and entering straight “ones” all the way down, in most cases without even reading the statements. In a small class, this effectively decimates the professor’s final evaluative point average, but gives the professor absolutely no useful information except “I don’t like you” or “I hate chemistry.”
So why does it hurt? Why even think about a statement like that for more than the .5 seconds it takes to read it? If 32 people tell me I’m boring, I need to take a look at that; but if one person tells me I’m boring and 31 tell me I’m great, why not get a grip and be rational about it? Why is it the case that so many of us simply can NOT put these horrific little poison-pen-wielding characters out of our minds? I know a huge number of my colleagues who have the same experience – even if they know, rationally and logically, that it’s probably not going to cause The End Of Their Career, they still lie there at night wondering why this kid thought that their course, which they spent so much time on and thought so hard about, was a total waste of time. Or why a course that had a carefully-delineated calendar, specific guidelines for every assignment, clear grading criteria, and a logical sequence of lectures was “unorganized.” Or why they thought the TA was “better than the teacher.” Or why person X thinks that Professor Y is “mean,” or that Professor Z treats some students differently than others, when Professor Z knocks himself out to treat everyone the same. (I’m not making this up; these are things that colleagues at various schools have shared with me.)
I think there are several reasons. OK, they’re not necessarily rational; but if we think about the reasons, maybe it will help. Maybe it won’t, and we’ll wake up at 4 am anyhow. I offer the following:
1) It just plain hurts to have mean-spirited comments aimed at you, whether you should pay attention to them or not. This is human nature.
2) Most of us hear and remember criticisms much more acutely than praise or compliments. I don’t know if it’s human nature or if it’s our culture; but it’s a very real phenomenon. This is true even if the criticism is mean-spirited, useless, unconstructive, or just plain untrue. It starts up the inner sound file: you’re a fake, you’re not really very good, you’re inept, blah blah blah. My Buddhist teachers would tell us that this is just one more way for the ego to focus on itself, and of course it is. However, I often wonder why the ego gets so much more stuck on the bad stuff, and doesn’t luxuriate in the other umpteen good comments. (Actually, my Tibetan teachers were mystified by that as well – they told us many times that they had a hard time understanding the culture of self-loathing that seems to be rampant in the west.) My guess is that we are socialized to play down compliments—after all, that would be conceited—and to focus instead on the Puritanical pastime of correcting our numerous and certainly unforgivable faults, which will make us very ‘umble and get us into Hebben much faster.
3) Speaking of Hebben, I think that academia now suffers from a kind of low-grade, pervasive anxiety about disgruntled students, as we experience a rising number of incidents in which some undiagnosed sociopath goes on a shooting spree because he didn’t get into law school. Handing out a deserved F used to be an ethical imperative; but I would be interested to know how many other professors now experience a fleeting vision of a nut with a semi-automatic when they use the F key, or when they read a hateful, mean-spirited evaluation. I suspect that many of us do, but won’t admit it because it somehow feels “cowardly.”
4) Some of us, even when there is an isolated bad evaluation, actually spend time wondering what this person experienced that was different from the majority of the others, and WHY they experienced it. It’s extremely possible that it had nothing to do with us, but there is always the possibility that we didn’t pick up some message, especially from a first-year student who may not know yet how to effectively tell a professor “I’m having a real problem here.” The fact that the evaluations are anonymous (and should be) means that we cannot solve this problem, because we can’t address the student, and in a big class we can’t even begin to guess who it was.
Obviously, I’m not offering a band-aid or a solution, or offering a foolproof way to remain unaffected, because I don’t have one (other than my Buddhist teachers’ suggestion to quit focusing on one’s self all the time.) All you can really do is read the comments, assess whether or not you need to address the issues raised by the negative ones, and then let it go and just continue to do the best you can.
Humor also helps. I suppose it is possible to find some humor in The Biggest and most Boring Waste of My Life Ever. One can find it in other examples too: like the person who gave me a very low number in the category of “sticking too strongly to the textbook.” Newsflash, Dude: There was no textbook for that particular class. Another one wrote “Too many student questions.” Well, I guess we’ll have to do away with THAT age-old mode of student-teacher discourse, and Socrates can go to hell. Another one didn’t like the “method in which the information was presented” in a certain class; that was a tough one, since I was a sabbatical “Sub” for Professor X, and was using Professor X’s format, which has historically been very popular. Ironically, another student commented that the class was MUCH better on the couple of days when Professor X came in and taught it (ouchies.). So, apparently Professor X’s method of presenting information is a problem, but the class was much better when Professor X taught it. There’s humor in there somewhere.
Having said all this, my last comment goes out to the students of mine who might be reading this (and I know that some of you do):
I know and honor the fact that most of you use the evaluation forms constructively. I read them all, I think about them all, and I care about them all. And the fact that some people make comments that are hurtful, unthoughtful or wacko does not, and will never, cause me to ignore all the others. Keep saying what’s on your mind—it’s up to us as professors to be able to use your feedback wisely, to get a grip, and to learn how to discern thoughtful criticism from a comment that combines Family Guy Peter Griffin’s logic with Stewie’s delivery.
Now, where are those chocolate cookies? I need one…
I have spent many hours with my colleagues talking about these documents, which are viewed by a great many professors as one of the great curses of our educational system. In theory, of course, they’re not supposed to be a curse. They’re supposed to help us assess and improve our own teaching ability, and provide students with a vehicle for honest and anonymous feedback that is a matter of public record — all of which, I think, is extremely important. In practice, however, everyone is scared to death that the information gathered on the evaluations is going to be used against them in some yet-to-be-determined way.
And does that happen? Oh, yes, it does. In some academic cultures, if there is a candidate for tenure who has rubbed someone the wrong way, or has unpopular political views, it’s extremely convenient to discover that he or she has some negative student evaluations. But let’s be honest: does this usually happen? Probably not, unless you have a department full of vipers, in which case you might seriously improve you quality of life by getting another job before you’re up for tenure (easier said than done, I know.)
There are, however, other issues connected with student evaluations that have nothing to do with ornery colleagues. They have everything to do with our own peace of mind as instructors. When in a rational, calm mood, or when trying to encourage a colleague who took a hit from one of these things, I have often expressed the opinion that student evaluations should be read as a “big picture.” If a hundred-fifty students think you’re great, and one thinks that you’re a total loser, you don’t probably need to be too worried about the one disgruntled camper. And, I believe that – I really do, when I’m Sittin’ in My Happy Place.
The problem is, if you love your students, you work your ass off more than 40 hours a week trying to stay on top of your field, you try to write interesting courses, and you meet with what seems like a zillion students a week, it feels like a kick in the teeth to read that one of your courses was “The Biggest and most Boring Waste of My Life Ever” (my favorite from the most recent batch.)
This does not hurt because I am worried about a tenure committee. I assume, because I am an optimist, that my committee will have already waded through the 149 positive comments before they got to this beaut. And, because I’m an optimist, I also believe that most people on most tenure committees, having gone through the process themselves, are completely aware that these anomalies are just that – anomalies. I also think that most people on tenure committees realize that there is a certain type of student for whom filling out a teacher evaluation form is akin to an opportunity to kick the cat because s/he’s had a lousy day. These students do not write constructive criticism. They do not write things like “I felt that the exams were too extensive to finish adequately in a 50-minute period.” Nor do they write funny comments that you can easily blow off, like “Less quizzes-more hot chicks.” (Yes, that was a real one.) No; they say things like “Biggest and most Boring Waste of My Life Ever” or “I hated this professor and I’m going to tell everyone I know not to take a class from him,” without giving one single reason why. (A friend of mine once got that one.) These students are not concerned about the consequences of their comments; in fact, they may have enough spite in them to hope that there are consequences. They are probably also oblivious to the possibility that a non-tenured professor might go through hell with a tenure committee because that student had a bad day and vented on a piece of paper.
Another favorite activity of this particular kind of student is to lash out via the numerical portion of an evaluation form. Given a set of statements and asked to rate the teacher in each area on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the highest, they skew the numbers by going right down the page and entering straight “ones” all the way down, in most cases without even reading the statements. In a small class, this effectively decimates the professor’s final evaluative point average, but gives the professor absolutely no useful information except “I don’t like you” or “I hate chemistry.”
So why does it hurt? Why even think about a statement like that for more than the .5 seconds it takes to read it? If 32 people tell me I’m boring, I need to take a look at that; but if one person tells me I’m boring and 31 tell me I’m great, why not get a grip and be rational about it? Why is it the case that so many of us simply can NOT put these horrific little poison-pen-wielding characters out of our minds? I know a huge number of my colleagues who have the same experience – even if they know, rationally and logically, that it’s probably not going to cause The End Of Their Career, they still lie there at night wondering why this kid thought that their course, which they spent so much time on and thought so hard about, was a total waste of time. Or why a course that had a carefully-delineated calendar, specific guidelines for every assignment, clear grading criteria, and a logical sequence of lectures was “unorganized.” Or why they thought the TA was “better than the teacher.” Or why person X thinks that Professor Y is “mean,” or that Professor Z treats some students differently than others, when Professor Z knocks himself out to treat everyone the same. (I’m not making this up; these are things that colleagues at various schools have shared with me.)
I think there are several reasons. OK, they’re not necessarily rational; but if we think about the reasons, maybe it will help. Maybe it won’t, and we’ll wake up at 4 am anyhow. I offer the following:
1) It just plain hurts to have mean-spirited comments aimed at you, whether you should pay attention to them or not. This is human nature.
2) Most of us hear and remember criticisms much more acutely than praise or compliments. I don’t know if it’s human nature or if it’s our culture; but it’s a very real phenomenon. This is true even if the criticism is mean-spirited, useless, unconstructive, or just plain untrue. It starts up the inner sound file: you’re a fake, you’re not really very good, you’re inept, blah blah blah. My Buddhist teachers would tell us that this is just one more way for the ego to focus on itself, and of course it is. However, I often wonder why the ego gets so much more stuck on the bad stuff, and doesn’t luxuriate in the other umpteen good comments. (Actually, my Tibetan teachers were mystified by that as well – they told us many times that they had a hard time understanding the culture of self-loathing that seems to be rampant in the west.) My guess is that we are socialized to play down compliments—after all, that would be conceited—and to focus instead on the Puritanical pastime of correcting our numerous and certainly unforgivable faults, which will make us very ‘umble and get us into Hebben much faster.
3) Speaking of Hebben, I think that academia now suffers from a kind of low-grade, pervasive anxiety about disgruntled students, as we experience a rising number of incidents in which some undiagnosed sociopath goes on a shooting spree because he didn’t get into law school. Handing out a deserved F used to be an ethical imperative; but I would be interested to know how many other professors now experience a fleeting vision of a nut with a semi-automatic when they use the F key, or when they read a hateful, mean-spirited evaluation. I suspect that many of us do, but won’t admit it because it somehow feels “cowardly.”
4) Some of us, even when there is an isolated bad evaluation, actually spend time wondering what this person experienced that was different from the majority of the others, and WHY they experienced it. It’s extremely possible that it had nothing to do with us, but there is always the possibility that we didn’t pick up some message, especially from a first-year student who may not know yet how to effectively tell a professor “I’m having a real problem here.” The fact that the evaluations are anonymous (and should be) means that we cannot solve this problem, because we can’t address the student, and in a big class we can’t even begin to guess who it was.
Obviously, I’m not offering a band-aid or a solution, or offering a foolproof way to remain unaffected, because I don’t have one (other than my Buddhist teachers’ suggestion to quit focusing on one’s self all the time.) All you can really do is read the comments, assess whether or not you need to address the issues raised by the negative ones, and then let it go and just continue to do the best you can.
Humor also helps. I suppose it is possible to find some humor in The Biggest and most Boring Waste of My Life Ever. One can find it in other examples too: like the person who gave me a very low number in the category of “sticking too strongly to the textbook.” Newsflash, Dude: There was no textbook for that particular class. Another one wrote “Too many student questions.” Well, I guess we’ll have to do away with THAT age-old mode of student-teacher discourse, and Socrates can go to hell. Another one didn’t like the “method in which the information was presented” in a certain class; that was a tough one, since I was a sabbatical “Sub” for Professor X, and was using Professor X’s format, which has historically been very popular. Ironically, another student commented that the class was MUCH better on the couple of days when Professor X came in and taught it (ouchies.). So, apparently Professor X’s method of presenting information is a problem, but the class was much better when Professor X taught it. There’s humor in there somewhere.
Having said all this, my last comment goes out to the students of mine who might be reading this (and I know that some of you do):
I know and honor the fact that most of you use the evaluation forms constructively. I read them all, I think about them all, and I care about them all. And the fact that some people make comments that are hurtful, unthoughtful or wacko does not, and will never, cause me to ignore all the others. Keep saying what’s on your mind—it’s up to us as professors to be able to use your feedback wisely, to get a grip, and to learn how to discern thoughtful criticism from a comment that combines Family Guy Peter Griffin’s logic with Stewie’s delivery.
Now, where are those chocolate cookies? I need one…
Friday, December 28, 2007
Winter Solstice 07
Since I left Massachusetts in 1987, I have only once spent the Winter Solstice in my own home, either in Indiana or in Texas. The holiday season is one of the few times I get to go back and see my family and friends in New England. So, at the cold and dark time of the year, I find myself navigating snowy highways and (inevitably delayed) airplanes, headed straight for an even colder and darker world.
Ever walk outside right after a big snowstorm, before the plows start rumbling and the sound of dozens of people digging out their internal combustion vehicles begins? Silence rules. If the storm ends at night, there is nothing but silence, black-blue sky (often with a huge star-display), and a vast expanse of white, which is tinged with pink if the moon is up and shining at a particular angle.
It is extraordinarily beautiful -- if you live in a heated house, or you are a hibernating bear. It is not so beautiful if you are homeless, or if you are a sparrow with your little feathers puffed to the max. It is the dual spirit of the Winter Solstice: death, dormant, cold and silent on the one hand, while on the other hand our local star is on the increase, and the Green Man’s return is promised in no uncertain terms.
The Earth is telling us that this should be a time of quiet, of contemplation, of sleeping later than usual, of cooking and eating the vegetables, grains and beans that were stored in the root cellar. Viewed in this way, the quiet of winter, and the resultant diminished activity, lends itself to reflection, which in turn leads to meditation on the year that has just passed; its experiences, its events, its joys and hardships, and our own actions. And, if you should want to light up a Yule log to remind you that the sun is on the increase, that’s fine too; there’s nothing like contemplating the past year curled up in front of the fireplace with the hot apple cider.
Of course, this is not what happens at all. The energy of the Winter Solstice could not be more diametrically opposed to the crazed and hectic energy that her out-of-touch humans are trying to impose on the season. We have turned the seasonal world upside down, at least here in so-called “western civilization.” Think of the travel, the hassles, the frenzied shopping, the calls, the plans, exams at the ends of semesters, the dysfunctional family gatherings – for that matter, even the happy family gatherings are hectic. We wonder why everyone is stressed, anxious, and flipped out during the Winter Solstice season; well, it makes perfect sense that we would be. We are screamin’, yellin’, and carryin’ on while Planet Earth is trying to sleep. It makes no natural, biorhythmic sense in any way whatsoever: it is the essence of the Denial of Nature.
We love to blame this Denial on post-industrial society and its frenzied consumerism, but in fact, this hyper-reaction against Nature’s quiet time is as old as humanity. The Romans had a ritual for this time of year – they called it Saturnalia. The idea was that everything would be turned upside-down: for one day, the slaves would rule, the masters would be slaves, and so on. I believe this also involved a certain amount of reckless partying. (I also suspect that if Ancient Rome had contained a Wallus-Martus Magnus, there would have been shameless consumerism as well.) Vestiges of this Roman tradition lasted well into the Middle Ages, when the same sort of role-reversal took place at the Feast of Fools (also aided and abetted by reckless partying.) In cultures all over the globe, from ancient times until the present, one can find Winter Solstice rituals that involve imbibing substances that make it feel less cold, and lighting things up and making them go Boom.
The church fathers who attempted to insert the Baby Jesus’ birthday into this mix probably knew that there was no way to stop the crazy stuff; their only prayer was to somehow attempt to tie it to something Christian. But forget dispensing with the wild celebrations -- even Cromwell and his super-Calvinist nutbars were ultimately unable to do that; they were simply outdone by the strength of the human compulsion start bonfires and administer some sort of recreational personal anesthesia when the days are too short and the wind is too cold. As the centuries progressed, the rolling snowball of Holiday Cheer gathered mass and momentum, turning the month of December into a kind of materialistic party-monster. And yet, at the heart of all this, the pervasive sense of unease remains. There is more depression, more suicide, more regret, more dysfunctional family behavior. And it’s my opinion that it happens because we are denying one half the dual nature of the Solstice: the dead, cold, silent, dormant side that we are trying to deny with our Christmas lights and our frenzied activity. To paraphrase the famous bumper sticker, “He who dies with the most toys” Still Dies -- and we don’t like it One Bit.
It was at this exact time of year, eleven years ago, that my father’s cancer – undiagnosed until it was way too late to do anything to save him – had sent him into a swift decline, while everyone jumped around having Christmas as if nothing was wrong. Apparently we were unable to all just say “Let’s screw all the presents and Christmas dinner, and just sit around quietly and enjoy each other’s company while we’re all still here,” because that would be admitting that one of us might not still be here in the near future. I was incredibly depressed and uncomfortable throughout the entire thing, and I would be dishonest if I did not admit that it has, even to this day, pretty much deep-sixed whatever lingering “holiday spirit” has not already been knocked out of me by the annual rat-race of trying to end a semester in time to buy gifts, get my house in order, find someone to take care of my animals, and hurriedly travel.
The Winter Solstice happened this year on December 22, in the wee hours of the morning (1:08 AM if you were on the U.S. east coast, 6:08 AM in Ireland, 10:08 the evening of the 21st if you were in Seattle or California.) I began this post a couple of days before the Solstice, and I am finishing it several days after. In the interim, something interesting happened to me: I became incredibly ill with a stomach virus, and effectively spent the entire Solstice period in a state of nauseated torpor, lying as still as possible in the guest room at my mother’s home. Everyone else in the house was also ill, which did away with any semblance of “holiday.” The weather was abysmal during a good part of the time – wind howling, freezing rain pelting the building. I thought a lot about the fact that I was being more or less forced by circumstance to lie completely still, and feel like Death. As I lay there I also contemplated the Tibetan Buddhist belief that illness is some kind of intense karmic purification; that you are “burning off” negative karma (or in my case, ejecting it.) I thought about the compatibility of that set of beliefs, and the whole idea of bonfires and Yule logs and yes, even the energy-wasting plethora of Christmas lights. In the monastery where my teachers live, they always have some sort of marathon practice on New Year’s Eve; either Vajrasattva, which is a great purification practice, or Tara, which is a practice said to remove obstacles. One might wish that my particular purification could have happened this year without such a literal emptying out of one’s physical contents, but … in 2007, that was my karma.
I wish I could say that all of this ruminating has brought me to some sort of huge insight, but I don’t think that it has, except to ponder this: I think that the desire to cleanse ourselves at this time of year may be as old as the bonfires. The problem is, we have no idea how to make this happen, so we keep showing up for the same movies hoping that they will end differently. Maybe this year’s presents will make us different. Maybe the dysfunctional families will get along and all the rotten old stuff will disappear like mist. When all that fails, we make goofball New Year’s Resolutions, most of which last about 48 hours if we’re lucky. We don’t really know what the hell it is we need to change, but at some deep level we know that without some process of purification, the detritus cannot be cleaned away. We know death has to happen for rebirth to happen; if the old year does not die away, the new one cannot come – but it’s hard to accept. Couldn’t it just come anyhow?
What would happen if we all asked ourselves, at each Winter Solstice: what needs to pass away now? (What – my ego? Oh…forget it; I don’t like this game. Can we just eat the cookies and play cards?) The Winter Solstice is probably a very good time for contemplation, purification, clarification, and fence-mending, and for gratitude—for the cessation of nausea, for second (and third and fourth) chances, for 3 minutes more light each day, and yet also for the darkness; and yes, also for the “death” part of the Solstice, for it’s the death part that turns the wheel and brings the “life” again. And it doesn’t matter whether your own personal mythology interprets that as reincarnation, the Resurrection, Enlightenment, cleaning all the crap out of your garage, watching the beans sprout from the compost, or knowing that the Earth will carry on after humanity’s demise – it is None of those things, and it is All of those things.
Ever walk outside right after a big snowstorm, before the plows start rumbling and the sound of dozens of people digging out their internal combustion vehicles begins? Silence rules. If the storm ends at night, there is nothing but silence, black-blue sky (often with a huge star-display), and a vast expanse of white, which is tinged with pink if the moon is up and shining at a particular angle.
It is extraordinarily beautiful -- if you live in a heated house, or you are a hibernating bear. It is not so beautiful if you are homeless, or if you are a sparrow with your little feathers puffed to the max. It is the dual spirit of the Winter Solstice: death, dormant, cold and silent on the one hand, while on the other hand our local star is on the increase, and the Green Man’s return is promised in no uncertain terms.
The Earth is telling us that this should be a time of quiet, of contemplation, of sleeping later than usual, of cooking and eating the vegetables, grains and beans that were stored in the root cellar. Viewed in this way, the quiet of winter, and the resultant diminished activity, lends itself to reflection, which in turn leads to meditation on the year that has just passed; its experiences, its events, its joys and hardships, and our own actions. And, if you should want to light up a Yule log to remind you that the sun is on the increase, that’s fine too; there’s nothing like contemplating the past year curled up in front of the fireplace with the hot apple cider.
Of course, this is not what happens at all. The energy of the Winter Solstice could not be more diametrically opposed to the crazed and hectic energy that her out-of-touch humans are trying to impose on the season. We have turned the seasonal world upside down, at least here in so-called “western civilization.” Think of the travel, the hassles, the frenzied shopping, the calls, the plans, exams at the ends of semesters, the dysfunctional family gatherings – for that matter, even the happy family gatherings are hectic. We wonder why everyone is stressed, anxious, and flipped out during the Winter Solstice season; well, it makes perfect sense that we would be. We are screamin’, yellin’, and carryin’ on while Planet Earth is trying to sleep. It makes no natural, biorhythmic sense in any way whatsoever: it is the essence of the Denial of Nature.
We love to blame this Denial on post-industrial society and its frenzied consumerism, but in fact, this hyper-reaction against Nature’s quiet time is as old as humanity. The Romans had a ritual for this time of year – they called it Saturnalia. The idea was that everything would be turned upside-down: for one day, the slaves would rule, the masters would be slaves, and so on. I believe this also involved a certain amount of reckless partying. (I also suspect that if Ancient Rome had contained a Wallus-Martus Magnus, there would have been shameless consumerism as well.) Vestiges of this Roman tradition lasted well into the Middle Ages, when the same sort of role-reversal took place at the Feast of Fools (also aided and abetted by reckless partying.) In cultures all over the globe, from ancient times until the present, one can find Winter Solstice rituals that involve imbibing substances that make it feel less cold, and lighting things up and making them go Boom.
The church fathers who attempted to insert the Baby Jesus’ birthday into this mix probably knew that there was no way to stop the crazy stuff; their only prayer was to somehow attempt to tie it to something Christian. But forget dispensing with the wild celebrations -- even Cromwell and his super-Calvinist nutbars were ultimately unable to do that; they were simply outdone by the strength of the human compulsion start bonfires and administer some sort of recreational personal anesthesia when the days are too short and the wind is too cold. As the centuries progressed, the rolling snowball of Holiday Cheer gathered mass and momentum, turning the month of December into a kind of materialistic party-monster. And yet, at the heart of all this, the pervasive sense of unease remains. There is more depression, more suicide, more regret, more dysfunctional family behavior. And it’s my opinion that it happens because we are denying one half the dual nature of the Solstice: the dead, cold, silent, dormant side that we are trying to deny with our Christmas lights and our frenzied activity. To paraphrase the famous bumper sticker, “He who dies with the most toys” Still Dies -- and we don’t like it One Bit.
It was at this exact time of year, eleven years ago, that my father’s cancer – undiagnosed until it was way too late to do anything to save him – had sent him into a swift decline, while everyone jumped around having Christmas as if nothing was wrong. Apparently we were unable to all just say “Let’s screw all the presents and Christmas dinner, and just sit around quietly and enjoy each other’s company while we’re all still here,” because that would be admitting that one of us might not still be here in the near future. I was incredibly depressed and uncomfortable throughout the entire thing, and I would be dishonest if I did not admit that it has, even to this day, pretty much deep-sixed whatever lingering “holiday spirit” has not already been knocked out of me by the annual rat-race of trying to end a semester in time to buy gifts, get my house in order, find someone to take care of my animals, and hurriedly travel.
The Winter Solstice happened this year on December 22, in the wee hours of the morning (1:08 AM if you were on the U.S. east coast, 6:08 AM in Ireland, 10:08 the evening of the 21st if you were in Seattle or California.) I began this post a couple of days before the Solstice, and I am finishing it several days after. In the interim, something interesting happened to me: I became incredibly ill with a stomach virus, and effectively spent the entire Solstice period in a state of nauseated torpor, lying as still as possible in the guest room at my mother’s home. Everyone else in the house was also ill, which did away with any semblance of “holiday.” The weather was abysmal during a good part of the time – wind howling, freezing rain pelting the building. I thought a lot about the fact that I was being more or less forced by circumstance to lie completely still, and feel like Death. As I lay there I also contemplated the Tibetan Buddhist belief that illness is some kind of intense karmic purification; that you are “burning off” negative karma (or in my case, ejecting it.) I thought about the compatibility of that set of beliefs, and the whole idea of bonfires and Yule logs and yes, even the energy-wasting plethora of Christmas lights. In the monastery where my teachers live, they always have some sort of marathon practice on New Year’s Eve; either Vajrasattva, which is a great purification practice, or Tara, which is a practice said to remove obstacles. One might wish that my particular purification could have happened this year without such a literal emptying out of one’s physical contents, but … in 2007, that was my karma.
I wish I could say that all of this ruminating has brought me to some sort of huge insight, but I don’t think that it has, except to ponder this: I think that the desire to cleanse ourselves at this time of year may be as old as the bonfires. The problem is, we have no idea how to make this happen, so we keep showing up for the same movies hoping that they will end differently. Maybe this year’s presents will make us different. Maybe the dysfunctional families will get along and all the rotten old stuff will disappear like mist. When all that fails, we make goofball New Year’s Resolutions, most of which last about 48 hours if we’re lucky. We don’t really know what the hell it is we need to change, but at some deep level we know that without some process of purification, the detritus cannot be cleaned away. We know death has to happen for rebirth to happen; if the old year does not die away, the new one cannot come – but it’s hard to accept. Couldn’t it just come anyhow?
What would happen if we all asked ourselves, at each Winter Solstice: what needs to pass away now? (What – my ego? Oh…forget it; I don’t like this game. Can we just eat the cookies and play cards?) The Winter Solstice is probably a very good time for contemplation, purification, clarification, and fence-mending, and for gratitude—for the cessation of nausea, for second (and third and fourth) chances, for 3 minutes more light each day, and yet also for the darkness; and yes, also for the “death” part of the Solstice, for it’s the death part that turns the wheel and brings the “life” again. And it doesn’t matter whether your own personal mythology interprets that as reincarnation, the Resurrection, Enlightenment, cleaning all the crap out of your garage, watching the beans sprout from the compost, or knowing that the Earth will carry on after humanity’s demise – it is None of those things, and it is All of those things.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Snyder: Performance and the "Deep World"
Gary Snyder is one of my favorite writers and poets. In 2006, he presented an essay entitled “Writers and the War Against Nature” for the Daesan Foundation’s International Literary Festival conference. The essay was nominated for a Pulitzer. This is an excerpt. There’s nothing more I can say about it that it won’t say better itself.
[begin quote]
[begin quote]
One time in Alaska a young Koyukon Indian college student asked me, “If we humans have made such good use of animals, eating them, singing about them, drawing them, riding them, and dreaming about them, what do they get back from us?” I thought it an excellent question, directly on the point of etiquette and propriety, and putting it from the animals’ side. I told her, “The Ainu say that the deer, salmon, and bear like our music and are fascinated by our languages. So we sing to the fish or the game, speak words to them, say grace. We do ceremonies and rituals. Performance is currency in the deep world’s gift economy.” The “deep world” is of course the thousand-million-year-old world of rock, soil, water, air, and all living beings, all acting through their roles. “Currency” is what you pay your debt with. We all receive, every day, the gifts of the Deep World, from the air we breathe to the food we eat. How do we repay that gift? Performance. “A song for your supper.”
I went on to tell her that I felt that non-human nature is basically well-inclined toward humanity and only wishes modern people were more reciprocal, not so bloody. The animals are drawn to us, they see us as good musicians, and they think we have cute ears. The human contribution to the planetary ecology might be our entertaining eccentricity, our skills as musicians and performers, our awe-inspiring dignity as ritualists and solemn ceremonialists—because that is what seems to delight the watching wild world…
…Art takes nothing from the world; it is a gift and an exchange. It leaves the world nourished.
Poems, novels, and plays, with their great deep minds of story, awaken the Heart of Compassion. And so they confound the economic markets, rattle the empires, and open us up to the actually existing human and animal world. Performance is art in motion; in the moment; both enactment and embodiment. This is exactly what nature herself is.
Soaring just over the sea-foam
riding the wind of the endless waves
albatross, out there, way
away, a far cry
down from the sky.
-----Gary Snyder, “Writers and the War Against Nature," 2006
Monday, September 24, 2007
To Increase Your Attention Span, click here...
The new Shambhala Sun has some fantastic articles this month. One is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated essay by poet Gary Snyder called “Writers and the War Against Nature.” Highly recommended. (www.shambhalasun.com; they haven’t got the November issue up online yet, but when they do there will probably be an excerpt.)
Also in this month’s issue is a short article by David Loy entitled “The Attack on Attention.” It’s so entirely relevant to the art of teaching, as well as the cultivation of mindfulness (Buddhist and otherwise), that I herewith offer a short excerpt:
Consider, for example, how MP3 players are changing the ways we listen to music. A century ago, you were part of a live audience, and you would settle down and focus on the music being performed. Today, strolling along with my iPod, my decision to listen to any particular piece of music is never completely settled, because I can constantly change what is playing if I become dissatisfied with it.
[Dharmonia comment: this is why musical structure is one of the most difficult things for contemporary music students to grapple with – often, the only time they listen to a piece in its entirety is when they are performing it.]
This applies to many other aspects of our lives…Our old foraging habits were based on info scarcity, but suddenly we find ourselves trying to survive an info glut,and the scarcest resources have become attention and control over our own time. Social anthropologist Thomas Eriksen has formalized this relationship into a general law of the information revolution: “When an ever-increasing amount of information has to be squeezed into the relatively constant amount of time each of us has at our disposal, the span of attention necessarily decreases.”
One problem with such an avalanche of information (and therefore shorter attention span) is that it challenges our ability to construct narratives and logical sequences. Sherry Turkle has noticed that some of her MIT students now reason and arrange their ideas differently. “There is this sense that the world is out there to be Googled,” she says, “and there is this associative glut. But linking from one thing to another is not the same as having something to say. A structured thought is more than a link.”
End of quote.
Our ability to construct narratives and logical sequences: this articulates very precisely the biggest weakness I see in my students as a whole. Mr Loy has given me a lot to think about: how do we nurture this ability in sentient beings lost a sea of info-glut? The question is important, because this is precisely what I feel that I and other professors are called to do – in fact, are obligated to do. A culture with no narrative is doomed; and a culture lacking the ability to create logical sequences will continue to believe that Iraq was responsible for 9-11. We have to find a way to help students either maintain or find these abilities, and still live in the twenty-first century – we must, as one Zen teacher put it, show up for the impossible.
Also in this month’s issue is a short article by David Loy entitled “The Attack on Attention.” It’s so entirely relevant to the art of teaching, as well as the cultivation of mindfulness (Buddhist and otherwise), that I herewith offer a short excerpt:
Consider, for example, how MP3 players are changing the ways we listen to music. A century ago, you were part of a live audience, and you would settle down and focus on the music being performed. Today, strolling along with my iPod, my decision to listen to any particular piece of music is never completely settled, because I can constantly change what is playing if I become dissatisfied with it.
[Dharmonia comment: this is why musical structure is one of the most difficult things for contemporary music students to grapple with – often, the only time they listen to a piece in its entirety is when they are performing it.]
This applies to many other aspects of our lives…Our old foraging habits were based on info scarcity, but suddenly we find ourselves trying to survive an info glut,and the scarcest resources have become attention and control over our own time. Social anthropologist Thomas Eriksen has formalized this relationship into a general law of the information revolution: “When an ever-increasing amount of information has to be squeezed into the relatively constant amount of time each of us has at our disposal, the span of attention necessarily decreases.”
One problem with such an avalanche of information (and therefore shorter attention span) is that it challenges our ability to construct narratives and logical sequences. Sherry Turkle has noticed that some of her MIT students now reason and arrange their ideas differently. “There is this sense that the world is out there to be Googled,” she says, “and there is this associative glut. But linking from one thing to another is not the same as having something to say. A structured thought is more than a link.”
End of quote.
Our ability to construct narratives and logical sequences: this articulates very precisely the biggest weakness I see in my students as a whole. Mr Loy has given me a lot to think about: how do we nurture this ability in sentient beings lost a sea of info-glut? The question is important, because this is precisely what I feel that I and other professors are called to do – in fact, are obligated to do. A culture with no narrative is doomed; and a culture lacking the ability to create logical sequences will continue to believe that Iraq was responsible for 9-11. We have to find a way to help students either maintain or find these abilities, and still live in the twenty-first century – we must, as one Zen teacher put it, show up for the impossible.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Early Music is Dead; Long Live Early Music
Early Music is apparently in trouble – or so I hear. There's a perception that the field is not growing; that the audience today is comprised of the same people who came to Renaissance music concerts in their Birkenstocks in 1976. Recently I was informed that most of the members of the American Recorder Society and Early Music America are also eligible for membership in AARP, or soon to be so.
Is this true? And if so, why? Many early music performers and aficionados chalk this up to the same bugaboos that are besetting the classical music world in general: not enough public support, not enough education of the young, the demise of record stores and classical music labels, fewer labels wanting to invest in “fringe” repertoire, pop music heralding the demise of western civilization, and the hand-wringing goes on and on.
As a person who has been broadcasting so-called early music for 15 years and teaching it full-time for seven, here is my newsflash: Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music are NOT in danger. The act of playing medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music on historical instruments is also NOT in trouble. “Early Music,” however, may be in trouble.
“Early Music” is a concept – an invention of the 1960s and 1970s. Yes, it was a new, useful, innovative, and creative approach to the performance of particularly old Euro-Anglo music, despite the fact that the term “early music” itself was very problematic (what the hell does it mean?) and difficult to explain to the uninitiated. But the advent of the historical performance movement fired the imagination at a time when experimentation, and doing something that was “off the beaten track,” was both fashionable and encouraged. Hearing the music on the original period instruments was a revelation. Discovering new techniques, new pieces, and new approaches was refreshing. The repertoire also provided both performers and listeners with a musical experience that was at once “new” and yet strangely “familiar.” (For a good sampling of both Dorian and Mixolydian mode, I refer you to 1) most hymnals and 2) the entire plethora of 1960s British Invasion bands; for modal contrapuntal guitar pyrotechnics and some Fun With Rhythmic Prolations, I refer you to Led Zeppelin.) Even the vexing “Authenticity” problem, which put the movement in danger of disappearing into a vortex of “Earlier Than Thou” preciousness, was eventually put to rest as many of us took a slightly more ethnomusicological approach to the field, realizing that the past is, in fact, a different country, and we cannot create an “authentic” performance of anything before this morning without access to Bill and Ted’s Most Excellent Time-Traveling Phone Booth. We became more interested in an “authenticity” that had to do with the integrity of the performer and the scholarship that went into the historical performance method.
Meanwhile, the “early music” movement gained momentum like a snowball rolling down Taos Mountain’s triple-diamond slope. In the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s, early music represented the majority of classical music sales – OK, the numbers still aren’t exactly worrying Britney Spears, but it is a considerable percentage. So what has gone wrong? Where are all the younger “early music” people? What went wrong, in my opinion, is that the concept of “early music” as a self-contained entity has reached its expiration date – an expiration date that was programmed into it from the very beginning of its existence.
Let me attempt to explain my thoughts here.
It is impossible to sustain the image of “early music” as a NEW approach to performing the music of the 11th to the 18th centuries. At some point, the techniques of historical performance either had to be absorbed into the mainstream of classical music approaches, or people had to decide that they were not valid. Fortunately, the former has happened, and with flying colors. A person who wants to specialize in Baroque violin is no longer “on the fringe.” It is now considered normal for a conductor of a “modern” chamber orchestra to explore some of the techniques and performance practices that were championed by the “early music” players of earlier decades. A number of players are active in several different musical genres. As a result, we have a whole generation of performers who are quite active in these areas, and who play period instruments – in Baroque and Classical music in particular – but who do not necessarily self-identify as exclusively “early music” performers. They are much more apt to tell you that they specialize in chamber music. Many of them also play other kinds of music: mainstream classical, New Music, rock and roll, ambient music, Irish traditional music…
It is folly to try to market 700 years worth of music as one genre. In my opinion, this might be the single biggest mistake that the “early music movement” has made. It is not possible to describe, market, practice, or sustain this enormous repertoire of incredibly diverse music as One Large Category. (It doesn’t work that well with “World Music” either, although the marketing of World Music was done a bit more successfully.)
Presenters of concert series, for example, have found themselves in an interesting situation. Suppose their funding and their mission allows for one concert of New Music, one concert of World Music, and one concert of “early music” per year. On their desk are demo recordings of three exciting concerts: An all-Biber concert by a great young Baroque ensemble; a concert of New Music written for violas da gamba; and a performance of medieval Gallego-Portuguese Cantigas de Santa Maria. According to the established category of “early music,” the presenter will choose one of these concerts for their ‘early music’ niche. In fact, each of those three performances satisfies the criteria of a different category in their concert season; they could actually have all three and never stray from their mission.
Even in radio, the “early music” category could be problematic. On the one hand, it lent an enormous amount of freedom and diversity to the programming of a weekly hour of music (as I know well, having been the producer / host of a national early music radio program for many years.) On the other hand, it could be difficult to sell the program, because many program directors felt that they already incorporated plenty of “early music” into their daily playlists. In point of fact, their daily playlists contain loads of Baroque and early classical music, but not the earlier stuff, which in the case of my program has been the more prevalent repertoire programmed. However, since it was all lumped together in the category of “early music,” many program directors saw no point in adding more to their playlist.
Medieval music in particular, and some secular Renaissance music, has suffered from this narrow categorization, being the fringe of the fringe of “early music.” A concert of Playford dances, or medieval Italian laude spirituali done with voices and instruments, would both be completely appropriate for most folk festivals; yet many “early music” people don’t even attempt to market themselves to this demographic, and the folk and world music presenters have often not been made aware that this is an option for them. But if we want more people to hear medieval music – if we don’t want to limit it to the audiences who go to the “earliest” of the “early music” concerts (in other words, the weirdest) – it is absolutely crucial that we figure this out. A medieval ensemble should have a different presenter list than the one maintained by the baroque ensemble. But we have not done this. Not only have we tried to market it all to the same people, but even at our festivals we have often relegated the medieval concerts to some insane midnight hour, thus ensuring that it will be kept on the fringe, rather than have the medieval concert at a sane hour at a venue that normally is frequented by the world- and folk- music crowd (and by the way, this can also be a church – no reason to sacrifice the acoustic.)
We are also guilty of selling potential audiences short. This is a fault we share with a number of musics that attract “purists,” jazz and traditional folk being two other culprits. Why are we not putting the posters for our sacred chant concert at the local New-Age bookstore? (God forbid we should be associated with those new-age types.) Why doesn’t the Playford band advertise their concert to the local chapter of the SCA? (OK, the audience might show up in costume – but they have ears and hearts, and they can have a sincere and deep reaction to the music, even if they have a different approach to historical re-enactment than you do.) Audiences can tell if you think you are smarter / better / hipper than they are. And if they sense that, your audience will end up always being the same 26 people whom you deign to consider your equal.
While I’m on this rant, here’s another question: why do we record all “early music” the same way? If you think your particular flavor of “early music” is going to have a stronger appeal to the people who buy world and folk music, why not record it the way world and folk music is recorded? I’m not suggesting that you should sing Hildegard with a click track; however, it’s not outrageous to consider utilizing some multitrack digital technology in the process of recording a bunch of Cantigas de Santa Maria (at least, not in my opinion.) The mixing and mastering process is also different in folk and world music (unless it’s a field recording.) Ever notice that classical music records are way lower in volume than other genres of recorded music, even if those other genres are all acoustic? Any idea how much iPod volume-twiddling this requires (or setting of radio levels? It drives radio engineers nuts.) Why not experiment? Forget about authenticity. Music, once the most impermanent of all art forms, is now the most precisely preserved for posterity. The minute you stick a microphone in front of a medieval instrument, the process is no longer medieval, whether you are recording direct to digital with no edits (which, granted, is fine, and is what I’ve always done), or recording the basic tracks and then layering on extra vocals and instrumental parts (which I admit I would very much like to try with some medieval repertoire, just to see what happens.)
All right, enough ranting. What are we supposed to do about all of this? How do we attract younger listeners and players to early music?
Well, first of all, understand that They Are Out There. The repertoire is far from dead, and the ears of people under 40 are just as open to medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music as those of their older brothers and sisters. They also are just as fascinated by, and attracted to, historical instruments. This is not just true in Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York; I see their reactions every day, and I live out on the prairie 400 miles from Lah-Lah-Land. I have no "magic bullet" for attracting them, but I know for sure that we have to BE where they ARE.This may require thinking outside the Baby Boomer Box. Here are a few suggestions:
----- If you want someone between 18 and 30 to hear some “early music,” don’t wait around for them to hear it on NPR. Be where they are. They are on the Internet. Make a great video and put that sucker on YouTube. Use the media they listen to and watch.
----- Here's another place where they are: in school. Encourage the absorption of early music techniques into the mainstream of classical music, including classical music curriculum. It’s not necessary to have an official “Early Music Department” in order to have an “Introduction to Performance Practice” course, nor is it necessary to have a battalion of early instruments on hand.) It’s not even necessary to have a battalion of early instruments in order to play early music, as blasphemous as that may sound. They have to be introduced to it somehow, and if you need a hundred-thousand dollar grant to introduce them to it, it ain’t gonna happen in most college situations.
----- If you want younger kids to hear “early music,” put together an exciting program and bring it to the local high school or middle school. If you have college students who play early music, encourage them to do these presentations, so that the high school kids can see people close to their own age playing the stuff along with Grandma. (Two caveats: 1) Don’t expect to make money doing this. 2) If the persons involved at the schools can only wrap their brains around this if you are willing to climb into a costume or wear a funny hat, either get a good persuasive speech about why it's not necessary, or gut it out and take one for the team.
----- Allow the times to change. Make yourselves a killer website with interactivity and bells and whistles. (I know, I haven't done this yet. I haven't had time because of the above bullet points. I know it needs to be done.) Don’t wait around to “get signed;” get your CD on iTunes, put it on CDBaby. Call it (and the video) something that will show up in an internet search, so that when some kid is searching for a video game where two medieval avatars are knocking each other’s blocks off, your video just may Google up. Think about marketing the CD with some other descriptive term in addition to "Early Music," because no one seems to know what the hell early music is.
Early Music is "not dead yet." It may be driving up the wrong road looking for the party, but it ain't dead. We just need to point it in the right direction.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
How Is Your Practice?
The other day, in the middle of a conversation about something else, my buddy Coyotebanjo described several of his primary activities – playing music, teaching, and doing musicology, and even blogging – as “practices.” He said “Those are my practices.”
This got me to thinking. How do we define our activities as “practice?” Coyotebanjo’s view is quite different from the way many of us look at practice. For musicians, especially, “practice” can become something that the reality of everyday life seems to keep us from doing anywhere near as much as we’d like. “If I didn’t have so many damned students, I’d have time to practice.” (What is wrong with this picture?) The same goes for spiritual practice: how many of us attempt to meditate, only to find that we blow it off regularly because “life” got in the way? This definition of “practice” seems to be something that is only allowed to us as a reward. It’s reserved for a special activity of some kind, exclusive of our other activities. “You can practice your violin when your taxes are done.” “You can meditate after the laundry is folded or the article is edited.”
The word "practice," according to Merriam-Webster, came into the English language through a long convoluted path from the Greek praktikos, through its Latin and Middle French equivalents, to the Middle English practisen. Leaving out literary or archaic usages, as a transitive verb, practice means 1) to carry out, or apply; or 2) to perform or work at repeatedly so as to become proficient, or to train by repeated exercises. As an intransitive verb, it means 1) to do repeated exercises for proficiency; 2) to pursue a profession actively; 3) to do something customarily.
But there is a way of using the word “practice” that Merriam-Webster does not include. The dictionary definition includes brushing one’s teeth and learning how to tie one’s shoes. These are important activities, obviously, but there is an additional meaning we give to the word practice when it is applied to something that we “do customarily” or “perform or work at repeatedly” in order to create meaning in our lives, or to improve a skill that is edifying to us in some sort of meaningful, internally resuscitating or nurturing way. These are the sorts of practices that we punish ourselves by blowing off – but in fact, in Coyotebanjo’s world, these are not regarded as “special” – this kind of practice is what you do, because there is nothing more important, frankly, than creating meaning in your life. And why does it have to be limited to one thing? It’s ALL the things you choose to do on a regular basis because those activities have meaning to you or create meaning for you.
Does your work have meaning to you? Then it’s a practice. Does gardening have meaning to you? Then you bet it’s a practice. Anything you do. Maybe you do yoga, take a morning walk, bird-watch, say your TM mantra, recite nam myoho renge kyo, read the Bible, Koran, Torah, Heart Sutra, whatever you do that creates meaning for you, and hopefully for those around you. It doesn’t have to exclude “work.” Maybe you bring people’s mail to them every day. Maybe you make food for people every day. Maybe you manage other people’s money, or process their health insurance claims. Can this be meaningful? Can it be a practice? Would your life be better, and have more meaning, if your “job” were a practice?
To that end, it’s also worth considering that all our practices work in tandem with each other. For example, it’s much easier to make your “job” a practice when you’ve meditated that morning, even for 10 minutes. It’s much easier to make a performing for people a meaningful “practice” if you’ve “practiced” the technical stuff enough so that it’s not getting in your way and making you crazy on stage.
There are ways to sabotage any kind of practice, of course, as I know only too well. It’s very easy to strip the meaning out of even the most potentially rewarding activities. With apologies to Merriam-Webster, here are some “anti-definitions” of practice:
1) to perform or work at repeatedly so as to reward one’s self for previously having completed every other obligation in one’s life for a 52-week period.
2) to perform or work at repeatedly so as to punish ones’ self for a) sucking so badly at one’s instrument / sport / other skill; b) having an uncontrollable monkey-mind.
3) to pretend to perform or work repeatedly at something while staring into space / cruising the internet.
4) to perform or work at repeatedly so as to become more bad-ass than any other person who does the same activity.
5) to perform or work at repeatedly so that we will be loved and admired by mommy, daddy, teachers, partners, critics, Jesus, Buddha, God, and a variety of anonymous, emotionally-threatening entities created by our minds.
I realized recently that the single biggest impediment to my practice – both musical and spiritual – is a lack of conviction that such activity would “do any good.” When I tried to unpack the “do any good” part, I discovered that it really meant “a lack of conviction that such activity would result in a state of technical perfection / enlightenment.” What rubbish! How silly our minds are. (A therapist might say my, my, did we have some parents with extremely high expectations of their little darling? Time to get over it.)
I’ve decided I need to come up with a definition of practice that will work for me. To that end, I humbly offer a two-part combo-definition of meaningful practice.
1) to perform or work at something repeatedly and mindfully so as to create meaning in one’s life
2) to perform or work at something repeatedly and mindfully without any expectation of results.
Please note: I didn’t say there wouldn’t BE any results – I said don’t expect them. This is a very, very important distinction. If you don’t include part 2 of the definition, then I guarantee that all those anti-definitions are going to creep up and bite you.
A Zen teacher once said that every day we must "show up for the impossible." Perhaps this is the very definition of practice.
This got me to thinking. How do we define our activities as “practice?” Coyotebanjo’s view is quite different from the way many of us look at practice. For musicians, especially, “practice” can become something that the reality of everyday life seems to keep us from doing anywhere near as much as we’d like. “If I didn’t have so many damned students, I’d have time to practice.” (What is wrong with this picture?) The same goes for spiritual practice: how many of us attempt to meditate, only to find that we blow it off regularly because “life” got in the way? This definition of “practice” seems to be something that is only allowed to us as a reward. It’s reserved for a special activity of some kind, exclusive of our other activities. “You can practice your violin when your taxes are done.” “You can meditate after the laundry is folded or the article is edited.”
The word "practice," according to Merriam-Webster, came into the English language through a long convoluted path from the Greek praktikos, through its Latin and Middle French equivalents, to the Middle English practisen. Leaving out literary or archaic usages, as a transitive verb, practice means 1) to carry out, or apply; or 2) to perform or work at repeatedly so as to become proficient, or to train by repeated exercises. As an intransitive verb, it means 1) to do repeated exercises for proficiency; 2) to pursue a profession actively; 3) to do something customarily.
But there is a way of using the word “practice” that Merriam-Webster does not include. The dictionary definition includes brushing one’s teeth and learning how to tie one’s shoes. These are important activities, obviously, but there is an additional meaning we give to the word practice when it is applied to something that we “do customarily” or “perform or work at repeatedly” in order to create meaning in our lives, or to improve a skill that is edifying to us in some sort of meaningful, internally resuscitating or nurturing way. These are the sorts of practices that we punish ourselves by blowing off – but in fact, in Coyotebanjo’s world, these are not regarded as “special” – this kind of practice is what you do, because there is nothing more important, frankly, than creating meaning in your life. And why does it have to be limited to one thing? It’s ALL the things you choose to do on a regular basis because those activities have meaning to you or create meaning for you.
Does your work have meaning to you? Then it’s a practice. Does gardening have meaning to you? Then you bet it’s a practice. Anything you do. Maybe you do yoga, take a morning walk, bird-watch, say your TM mantra, recite nam myoho renge kyo, read the Bible, Koran, Torah, Heart Sutra, whatever you do that creates meaning for you, and hopefully for those around you. It doesn’t have to exclude “work.” Maybe you bring people’s mail to them every day. Maybe you make food for people every day. Maybe you manage other people’s money, or process their health insurance claims. Can this be meaningful? Can it be a practice? Would your life be better, and have more meaning, if your “job” were a practice?
To that end, it’s also worth considering that all our practices work in tandem with each other. For example, it’s much easier to make your “job” a practice when you’ve meditated that morning, even for 10 minutes. It’s much easier to make a performing for people a meaningful “practice” if you’ve “practiced” the technical stuff enough so that it’s not getting in your way and making you crazy on stage.
There are ways to sabotage any kind of practice, of course, as I know only too well. It’s very easy to strip the meaning out of even the most potentially rewarding activities. With apologies to Merriam-Webster, here are some “anti-definitions” of practice:
1) to perform or work at repeatedly so as to reward one’s self for previously having completed every other obligation in one’s life for a 52-week period.
2) to perform or work at repeatedly so as to punish ones’ self for a) sucking so badly at one’s instrument / sport / other skill; b) having an uncontrollable monkey-mind.
3) to pretend to perform or work repeatedly at something while staring into space / cruising the internet.
4) to perform or work at repeatedly so as to become more bad-ass than any other person who does the same activity.
5) to perform or work at repeatedly so that we will be loved and admired by mommy, daddy, teachers, partners, critics, Jesus, Buddha, God, and a variety of anonymous, emotionally-threatening entities created by our minds.
I realized recently that the single biggest impediment to my practice – both musical and spiritual – is a lack of conviction that such activity would “do any good.” When I tried to unpack the “do any good” part, I discovered that it really meant “a lack of conviction that such activity would result in a state of technical perfection / enlightenment.” What rubbish! How silly our minds are. (A therapist might say my, my, did we have some parents with extremely high expectations of their little darling? Time to get over it.)
I’ve decided I need to come up with a definition of practice that will work for me. To that end, I humbly offer a two-part combo-definition of meaningful practice.
1) to perform or work at something repeatedly and mindfully so as to create meaning in one’s life
2) to perform or work at something repeatedly and mindfully without any expectation of results.
Please note: I didn’t say there wouldn’t BE any results – I said don’t expect them. This is a very, very important distinction. If you don’t include part 2 of the definition, then I guarantee that all those anti-definitions are going to creep up and bite you.
A Zen teacher once said that every day we must "show up for the impossible." Perhaps this is the very definition of practice.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
The Fat Lady
The following passage is by J.D. Salinger, from Franny and Zooey. It was quoted in a (highly recommended) book called Getting Your Music Past the Fear, authored by the fantastic singer-songwriter-guitarist Don Richmond. You can substitute musician, poet, or anything you want for the word “actor” in the passage, and it will still work.
Om mani padme hum.
“Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I told him they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Far Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I went on the air again—all the years you and I were on the program together if you remember…”
“All right. Let me tell you something now buddy…Are you listening?
Franny, looking extremely tense, nodded.
“I don’t care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theater, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I’ll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me? There isn’t anybody out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is?...Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ himself. Christ himself, buddy.”
Om mani padme hum.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Meep Meep
For those who have been meditating in a cave and may not have heard the news, a few days ago a crazed gunman killed 33 people, including himself, at Virginia Tech.
“If I find out my roommate drank all my beer I’m gonna kill him.”
“I told my boss he could drop dead, I quit.”
“These kids never listen – I coulda shot ‘em.”
“If you try to take your sister’s cookie you’re gonna pull back a bloody stump.”
“When she said that to him I just coulda died.”
“When that kid gets home I’m gonna strangle him.”
“Another ticket! I swear I’m just gonna shoot myself”
“That exam was murder – there was blood on the floor after that one.”
Mild annoyance: This person’s procrastination just kills me.
Positive reactions: That new song of yours is killer.
Encouragement: Give it your best shot.
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