REFLECTIVE ESSAYS - TUNINGS

Introduction
These reflective essays or Tunings explore new habits of mind that bring us into attunement with the creative process. There is a Chinese proverb that says "A bird does not sing because it has the answer. It sings because it has a song".

These words capture my hope that these Tunings may also set free the human spirit and sing into existence our own song of the imagination. And that this song may help us discover what is natural to our own sense of being and hold the candle for navigating a more complex world.

Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.
                            —William Stafford, Any Morning

We understand what it means to live a productive life - to set quantifiable goals, develop action plans and evaluate outcomes. This offers a prescription for getting things done. But to live a life driven by agendas and outcomes can also create trouble in that it blinds us to another life. This is the gifted life. Because our gifts are not acquired through force of will, but bestowed through unaccountable acts of grace, we need to hold this life up to a different measure from the other.

For example there sometimes appears the recurring theme in a New Yorker cartoon where one person sits bleary eyed at the desk of a modestly furnished spare room of an office, the floor littered with crumpled scraps of paper. The partner stands at the door, the newspaper open and says something like ' According to the Times it only took Richard Nixon seven weeks to write his book'

It is this picture of insurmountable pressures brought about by time wasted, hopes squandered, of set backs, painful doubts, failed confidence and imperfections revealed that haunts our picture of the gifted life. It is the image to which poet WS Merwin tries to offer reassurance when he writes in his poem Berryman;

…you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure, don't write.

A New Way of Seeing

This idea that you can never be sure finds little resonance with a productive life. In this life we strive to live in the full flower of certainty and perfection in every moment. This may explain why successful people cannot write poems. They cannot easily release into the Self from which the gift flows. And what is the gift? It is something that comes to us gratuitously, often unpredictably, surprisingly, even mysteriously where even the artist does not fully comprehend the process or the outcomes. As the poet Paul Goodman wrote in his diary ' I have recently written a few good poems but I had no feeling that I wrote them." Or the pianist who, after a breathtaking concert says, "I don't know who was playing this evening, but it wasn't me."

It is this shift from finding there is nothing and then there is something that marks the gifted state. We can make explicit and orchestrate everything in the creative process but this - yet it is this that makes the difference between art that truly connects and moves others and art that doesn't. At some very early and critical stage in the creative process there is a necessity to release - to let go of oneself to make room for a deeper inspiration to come in. Yet this insight and awareness is like a shy animal - If we bring too much critical attention to it, it is no longer there. So to shine the flashlight and ask is this any good? is it memorable? will it change the world? May cause the very thing we are looking for to retreat and hide.

German poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes of this moment as … "Not any self control or self limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of oneself, not caution, but a wise blindness"

It is with this wise blindness that we proceed.

So a gifted state is not something we strive for so much as it is something we let go or release - even submit - too. If we cannot control the process, we can create the fertile ground for the gift to come in. When we build good soil, create the right surroundings and receptive atmosphere it is in the nature of the gifted world to find us, creation creates itself - life rushes in.

The Gift in Art

One of the most vital aspects of artistic work is that more is given to us that is made by us. It is in the nature of the world for the gift to come to those who have prepared themselves to receive it with gratitude and labor in its service? And it doesn't always come in the form we expect. The muse tests us to see how grateful and ready we are to work with the materials at hand. When we do, then something more and perhaps better will come later on.

To labour in the service of the gift is the quest. Interestingly it is by living deeply into questions that the gift is revealed to us. Questions cultivate a detachment to outcome. They keep us open to possibility and ensure that the gift spirit in kept in play. Most importantly, questions teach us how to accept uncertainty and the unknown not as a passing condition but as the only permanent space in which to dwell.

By holding us in a state of suspension questions also induce this more attentive and perceptive state of mind. It is a reminder that the gift is not entirely personal. When we accept this we may be more forgiving of the vicissitudes of the gifted life. That is, to be patient with delays, detours, approximations, set backs, indifference and those many other frustrations that quietly build the inner resilience for what more may come.

By connecting us to those parts of our being and experience that are not entirely personal -the space that was once filled with plans, goals and outcomes can now be filled with the imaginative empathy that flows from engagement with the more than human world of nature, community, memory, and appreciation for all that is.

Gifts Are An Agent of Liveliness

In this context perhaps the true measure of the gift in art is how it surprises us - that is, how it awakens our perception of the other, how we are moved by it and what it enlivens in our own soul. If we place it under too bright a light - as we so often do when we try to make art a commodity that can be replicated on demand, we risk sacrificing the gratuitous nature of the gift in art that gives it its inner power to change and transform.

In this respect gifts are the agent of liveliness. Their true measure is in how they undo our expectations and surprise us. And this may be how we learn to recognize the gift in art. It is the moment of heightened powers when the speaker speaks and is also spoken through, when the pianist plays and is also being played. We find ourselves in a place that is so close to our own nature and our own heart that there is no effort. While we are there, we cannot possibly be anywhere else. When we are not there, it seems impossible to find. But for a moment it has us. Once the matrix is set it is something from which to grow out from so that we may always act from a place of presence and in the fullness of our own gifted life.

Singing the World Into Existence

This is the world that the revered poet Walt Whitman awakens us to.

Afoot and light - hearted I take to the open road!
Healthy free the world before me!
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose!
… to know the universe itself as a road - as many roads - for traveling souls.

Walt Whitman's words bring us home to ourselves and our own gifted life. "The earth never tires" - he writes. Instead in every moment the world waits to give itself to our imagination. However much our abstract mind may wander and reach, and think and try to explain - the world waits for out intimate participation and in so doing, teaches us that it is not only there to complete us, we are also set here to complete the world.

Of Whitman's way of being in the world John Fentress Gardner writes;

This ideal- real nature of any and every object can stand out and be known only within the human soul. Whitman perceives that objects are waiting for this fulfillment, this chance through the love of an attentive human being, to arrive at last and be recognized in the sense of their permanent reality.
Gardner goes on to emphasize that… " Objects depend upon human beings to give them voice, to complete their manifestation - and thus to anchor them in eternity.

These words carry the essence of what it means to live in the gifted state. We do not need to retreat to a cave to live a gifted life. Nor do we need to play, paint, sculpt or write. All of these can be essential in the transforming of oneself. But not as an end state. Rather it is the quality of attention we cultivate as preparation for going ever more deeply into the world.

Walt Whitman's fertile ground was not only the open roads, fields and forests, it was also the bustle and trade of the New York City's inner core and the ferries and docks of Long Island Sound. Later it was spent ministering to the thousands of men ailing and dying from wounds in the civil war, men left languishing in poorly staffed hospitals to which he went each day to; read, consol, share stories, write letters and witness the suffering as well as the momentary joys amongst all of those whose lives he celebrated.

To live a gifted life is to create a common community of care. By celebrating the world of our choosing, through our own acts of attention, we sing the world into existence again.

A World Made Fresh Again

If this is where a gifted life may lead us, where do we begin? " Do not enter without desire." French Philosopher Paul Valery would say. It is by doing that which we desire, that is, that which most pleases us, and learning to do well for its own sake that we open the door to our own gifted life. It is so rare that we set aside the expectations of others to learn what we truly like for ourselves. And while the gift needs to be shared, the gift becomes a curse if it is pursued only for the benefit of others and does not first benefit ourselves.

When I left classical music studies to play my own music I knew that my music would never measure up to performing the works of Beethoven, Bach or Chopin. It was easy to feel inadequate in the shadow of the accomplishments of the great musical innovators. And for a time I considered not playing the piano at all. But then I discovered there was one thing I could do. I sat at the piano for an hour or so each day and allowed my fingers to shape and form the musical tone in a way that felt good to me. A little too sharp, hmm.. A little too flat, too soft, I would say as I searched for a feel and sound in the keys that pleased me that day.

As I listened to myself I also became more attuned to the subtle music that was emerging in the space between the notes… to the quality of the pauses, the rhythm, the release, ambience and tone - the language of touch which was slowly revealing that there was not only an intelligence of mind but also an intelligence of the hand. With this intelligence, even in the most solitary of moments I, like Whitman, strode freely into the world. To find the tone I liked included being attuned to my environment; to the wind, the water, the trees, the light and the smell and taste of the air. I had opened the doors and windows of my own growing imagination and let the fresh breezes blow in. There is so much that influences the changeable nature of the music that cannot be predicted or rehearsed in advance.

Over time I learned to make subtle aesthetic choices based my own deeply personal and felt preferences of what did and did not feel right. Every gifted life, however it is lived, involves finding our song for the open road and with this, the authenticity and truth of one's own voice. This voice does not come freely. Discovering what truly pleases us may be the most difficult and frightening thing we do. So often we devote our lives to serving the other voices demands upon us - we don't quite know what it means to please ourselves.

Yet is the life that poets William Stafford and Walt Whitman call us to; to be masters of reason and also servants of the gift so that may encounter a world made fresh again.

Give me the splendid silent sun
With all the beams full- dazzling;
Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard;
Give me a field where the unmow'd grass;
….Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers
where I can walk undisturbed

References

Lewis Hyde, The Gift Creativity and The Artist in the Modern World
(New York, Vintage Books, Second Edition 2007)

John Fentress Gardner American Heralds of the Spirit
(Hudson NY Lindisfarne Press 1992 )

Walt Whitman Selected Poems 1855-1892
A New Edition. Edited by Gary Schmidgall Stonewall Inn Editions.
( New York St Martin's Press 1999)

© April 2008 Michael Jones - Pianoscapes.com