Posted: 07 Jan 2015 12:30 AM PST
“Limitation
is the condition of our lives. What matters — what allows us to reach
beyond ourselves, as we are, and push at the boundaries of our ability —
is that we continue. But then everything depends on how we practice,
what we practice.”
In her
sublime memoir of the writing life, Dani Shapiro wrote:
“The
job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is
to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.” But the
sharpening-and-honing itself rarely feels like a joy when you are
mid-leap into the unknown, with no guarantee of whether your daily act
of showing up — of practice and perseverance — will ever amount to the
development of greatness. After all, Oscar Wilde famously quipped that
“only mediocrities develop.” And yet here we are a century later,
heeding psychologists’ growing body of evidence that
“grit” is far more important than “talent” and that
practice with a feedback loop is the surest road to success. Even so, the cult of inborn talent endures — after all, it is hard-baked into
our cultural mythology of genius — and continues to oppress aspiring artists.
“In
every musician’s mind lurks the fear that practicing is merely
busywork, that you are either born to your instrument or you are an
impostor,” writes
Glenn Kurtz in
Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music (
public library)
— his spectacular memoir of creative homecoming, brimming with vital
and poetically articulated wisdom on the artist’s life, deeply resonant
for every field of creative endeavor.
Having grown up playing guitar and working to become a professional
musician as a young adult, studying at a conservatory and winning some
competitions along the way, Kurtz found himself disillusioned and
exasperated with his progress, with the disheartening sense that
“ambition and expectation are sometimes not enough.” So he gave up the
dream of becoming an artist, borrowed a book from the New York Public
Library to learn typing, and got himself a
“real” job
as an editorial assistant in New York, to which he walked twenty blocks
to work every morning, “stunned and heartbroken, a sleepwalker.”
Illustration from 'About Time' by Vahram Muratyan. Click image for more.
Kurtz writes:
Every day felt like the waste of my entire life. For
fifteen years I had practiced to become an artist. But I’d misunderstood
what that meant… Most people give up their fantasies of art,
exploration, and invention. I was furious at myself for having believed I
was different, and even more furious that I wasn’t.
That anguishing personal emptiness was only compounded by New York’s
merciless collective cult of self-actualization, which left Kurtz even more crestfallen about the trajectory of his life:
There was more movement, more intense ambition and envy
in one block of New York City than in all of Vienna. But I had no part
in it. There was nothing here that I wanted. I was walking home from a
boring job, lost in a crowd of blue, gray, and brown business suits,
skirting oncoming cars like a scuttling pigeon, because I had given up.
My fingers were not to blame; nor were my parents, my teachers, music
history, or my instrument. With every step I felt more harshly how I had
failed, how fundamentally I had betrayed myself. Out of fear of being
mediocre, I’d listened to the wrong voices. I’d been practicing all the
wrong things.
[…]
Everyone who gives up a serious childhood dream — of becoming an
artist, a doctor, an engineer, an athlete — lives the rest of their life
with a sense of loss, with nagging what ifs.
[…]
Only a very few loves can disappoint you so fundamentally that you
feel you’ve lost yourself when they’re gone. Quitting music wounded me
as deeply as any relationship in my life. It was my first great loss,
this innocent, awkward failure to live with what I heard and felt. For
more than ten years I avoided music. It hurt too much. My anger went as
deep as my love had gone. I suppose this is natural. In the aftermath of
something so painful, we subsist on bitterness, which sustains us
against even greater loss.
So he did something
few have the courage to do — after a fifteen-year detour from his true calling, he decided to
let his life speak
and face that menacing what-if head on by returning to his great love.
That homecoming to music was made possible by his deep commitment to
practicing — “a process of continual reevaluation, an attempt to bring
growth to repetition,” a delicate act that “teaches us the sweet,
bittersweet joy of development, of growth, of change” — day in and day
out.
Indeed, anyone who has ever experienced the
“spiritual electricity” of creative flow
can relate to Kurtz’s electrifying account of this transcendent
process-state and easily substitute his or her instrument of choice —
the pen, the camera, the keyboard — for his guitar:
Each note rubs the others just right, and the instrument
shivers with delight. The feeling is unmistakable, intoxicating. When a
guitar is perfectly in tune, its strings, its whole body will resonate
in sympathetic vibration, the true concord of well-tuned sounds. It is
an ancient, hopeful metaphor, an instrument in tune, speaking of pleasure on earth and order in the cosmos, the fragility of beauty, and the quiver in our longing for love.
Illustration from 'Herman and Rosie' by Gus Gordon. Click image for more.
Kurtz captures beautifully the enchanting absorption and tactile immediacy of this creative flow:
I concentrate on the simplest task, to play all the notes
at precisely the same moment, with one thought, one motion. It takes a
few minutes; sometimes, on bad days, it takes all morning. I take my
time. But I cannot proceed without this unity of thought, motion, and
sound.
[…]
I play deliberately, building a triangle of sound — fingertip, ear, fingertip — until my hands become aware of each other.
In a sentiment that calls to mind young Virginia Woolf’s
memorable meditation on the bodily ecstasy of music, he adds:
My attention warms and sharpens, and I shape the notes
more carefully. I remember now that music is vibration, a disturbance in
the air. I remember that music is a kind of breathing, an exchange of
energy and excitement. I remember that music is physical, not just in
the production of sounds, in the instrumentalist’s technique, but as an
experience. Making music changes my body, eliciting shivers, sobs, or
the desire to dance. I become aware of myself, of these sensations that
lie dormant until music brings them out. And in an instant the pleasure,
the effort, the ambition and intensity of playing grip me and shake me
awake. I feel as if I’ve been wandering aimlessly until now, as if all
the time I’m not practicing, I’m a sleepwalker.
[…]
Listening, drawing sound, motion, and thought together, I find my
concentration. My imagination opens and reaches out. And in that
reaching I begin to recognize myself.
Practicing in such a way, Kurtz points out, is an embodied experience
rather than one that takes place in the mind’s maze of abstraction — it
makes the “whole body alive with aspiration.” Indeed, these two
modalities are often in conflict — in one of his many insightful asides,
Kurtz issues an admonition that, like the book itself, applies with
equal precision to all creative endeavors:
It’s dangerous for a musician to philosophize instead of practicing. The grandeur of music, to be heard, must be played.
And in the playing — as in the writing, or the painting, or the knitting — is where we find the gateway to mastery:
Each day … practicing is the same task, this essential
human gesture — reaching out for an ideal, for the grandeur of what you
desire, and feeling it slip through your fingers.
The daily showing up and reaching out is, indeed, where
the crucial difference between success and mastery lies, as does Lewis Hyde’s essential dichotomy between
work and creative labor. Kurtz captures this elegantly:
Together this pleasure in music and the discipline of
practice engage in an endless tussle, a kind of romance. The sense of
joy justifies the labor; the labor, I hope, leads to joy. This, at
least, is the bargain I quietly make with myself each morning as I sit
down. If I just do my work, then pleasure, mastery will follow. Even the
greatest artists must make the same bargain.
[…]
Practicing is striving; practicing is a romance. But practicing is
also a risk, a test of character, a threat of deeply personal failure…
Every day I collide with my limits, the constraints of my hands, my
instrument, and my imagination. Each morning when I sit down, I’m
bewildered by a cacophony of voices, encouraging and dismissive, joyous
and harsh, each one a little tyrant, each one insisting on its own
direction. And I struggle to harmonize them, to find my way between
them, uncertain whether this work is worth it or a waste of my time.
Illustration from 'The Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseau,'
the heartening story of how the iconic painter attained creative success
in his later years, after a lifetime of hard work and rejection. Click
image for more.
Quoting harpsichordist Wanda Landowska —
“If everyone knew how to work, everyone would be a genius!” — Kurtz writes:
Practicing is training; practicing is meditation and
therapy. But before any of these, practicing is a story you tell
yourself, a bildungsroman, a tale of education and self-realization. For
the fingers as for the mind, practicing is an imaginative, imaginary
arc, a journey, a voyage. You must feel you are moving forward. But it
is the story that leads you on.
[…]
From the outside, practicing may not seem like much of a story… Yet
practicing is the fundamental story. Whether as a musician, as an
athlete, at your job, or in love, practice gives direction to your
longing, gives substance to your labor.
Indeed, this fundamental story of practicing is what lies beneath our culture’s
fascination with daily routines,
which always harbor the question of what propels the impulse to show up
day after day after day in the service of one’s private creative
enterprise. Kurtz offers a compelling answer:
Every day you go to the gym or sit down at your desk. The
work is not always interesting, not always fun. Sometimes it is
tedious. Sometimes it is infuriating. Why do you continue? Why did you
start in the first place? You must have an answer that helps you
persevere… Without telling yourself some story of practicing, without
imagining a path to your goal, the aggravation and effort seem
pointless. And without faith in the story you create, the hours of doubt
and struggle and the endless repetition feel like torture.
[…]
Practicing is a story, but not one in “square time,” not a simple
path to perfection. Instead, it is a myth you weave to draw up the many
strands of your doubt and desire… The story you tell yourself … must
embrace everything you experience when you sit down in the presence of
your ideal.
[…]
When you sit down to practice, however casually, you cast yourself as
the hero and victim of your own myth. You will encounter obstacles; you
will struggle, succeed, and struggle some more. The story of your
practice weaves all this together, absorbing what is within you and
making it productive. Because when you truly believe your story of
practicing, it has the power to turn routine into a route, to resolve
your discordant voices, and to transform the harshest, most intense
disappointment into the very reason you continue.
Unflinching belief in that master-story is also what allows us to
transcend the daily rebellions of our bodies and minds, and to go on
practicing:
Artistry may seem divine, but practicing is always
mundane. Practice immerses you in your daily self — this body, these
moods… You struggle with mistakes and flaws. The work is physical,
intellectual, psychological. It can be exhilarating and aggravating,
fulfilling and terribly lonesome. But it is always just you, the
instrument, and the music, here, now. Practicing is the truth of who you
are, today, as you strive to change, to make yourself better, to become
someone new. The goal is always to bring old notes to life. Even so,
while you sit down to work every day, it may take years before you know
what you’ve practiced.
And therein lies Kurtz’s most assuring wisdom:
Limitation is the condition of our lives. What matters —
what allows us to reach beyond ourselves, as we are, and push at the
boundaries of our ability — is that we continue. But then everything
depends on how we practice, what we practice.
[…]
I sit down to practice the fullness of my doubts and desire, my
fantasies and flaws. Each day I follow them as far as I can bear it, for
now. This is what teaches me my limits; this is what enables me to
improve. I think it is the same with anything you seriously practice,
anything you deeply love.
Practicing is an infinitely rewarding and ennobling read in its totality. Complement it with Dani Shapiro on
the pleasures and perils of the creative life and Debbie Millman on
the courage to choose the uncertain what-if.
