Nachmanovitch, Stephen. _The Art of Is: Improvising as a Way of Life_. Novato Calif: New World Library, 2019. # Progressive Summary Improvisation is [[Reference Notes/Highlights/Books/Emergent Strategy]]. It is seeing everything as a verb, as a process. It embraces Shunryu Suzuki's definition of Buddhism: "Everything changes." Meditation and contemplative practice are important to clear the mind and make space for improvisation, otherwise we are simply driven by the noise of the world. # Key Points Regard anything in your environment as an "offer", something you can improvise with. To listen properly, we need to rub against our environment, or the thing we're listening to. Rubbing means using part of ourselves to discern some other pattern. We are patterns rubbing against each other. Rubbing involves the possibility of being changed, because real contact is being made. Therefore, we must ourselves be open to the process of decay and change, just like a wabi sabi art object. Rubbing is an analog process, not a digital. No information is being lost. A digital process simply abstracts from another pattern. It protects itself through mathematical perfection. # Resonances He talks about [[Double-Entry]]: - Double-entry accounting was invented by one of those Italian Renaissance polymaths, the monk Luca Pacioli. He was also responsible for much of the theory behind perspective painting. Pacioli’s book The Divine Proportion was illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci. Accounting and perspective painting are both arts that revolve around representing a complex, multidimensional reality on a flat piece of paper. In accounting we draw a dividing line down the middle of the page, setting up a zero point so that the debits and credits reflect against each other. To this day every bank statement, every corporation’s accounting, works by Pacioli’s system. Similarly, perspective painting runs an imaginary line down the canvas; we orient ourselves in three-dimensional space by the frame of reference created by that line. Our brain plays with the details and contrasts, balancing the sides so that exceptional items really stick out. We draw that line and then use it to accentuate the interplay of figure and ground. # Quotes > In the Theatres Act of 1843, the British Parliament criminalized improvisation. All performances had to pass through the filter of state censorship, and theater managers were required to submit an advance copy of the script to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Unscripted theater could not be predicted and controlled. This law was eventually overturned — but not until 1968! > Del Close, one of the gurus of instant theater, said that your job as an improviser is not to come up with clever lines but to make your partner’s shitty line sound good. Keith Johnstone describes this principle using the wonderfully old-fashioned word chivalry. This is something we seldom see in the public sphere: mutual respect, mutual support, building something together that we might never have dreamt of on our own. Improvising is all about human relationship. It is about listening, responding, connecting, and being generous. > Union organizers have a technique for bringing a factory to a standstill without actually going on strike. It is called an obedience strike, or work-to-rule. Quite simply, the workers follow every rule and regulation to the letter. We’re going to do our job exactly as it is stipulated. The problem is that no one can design a formula, job description, or software algorithm for every contingency. Soon everything grinds to a halt. If management wants to frustrate the work-to-rule action, they have to com- mand the workers as follows: you must interpret your jobs freely, using personal judgment about each case based on text. What a marvelous double bind! “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” — one of the most practical statements in the Bible. > The pioneering theater and film director Peter Brook pointed out that in the days of Ibsen and Chekhov, people went to the theater to see well-written plays acted out with the magic of lights, sets, costumes, and so forth. Today, with movies and TV, many of those elements can be realized far better than on the stage. So what now is the function of live theater, whether improvised, composed, or a hybrid between? Brook’s answer is that we go to the theater to be personally involved in an event that can only happen in this place, at this time, at this temperature, in these acoustics, with these people. We come for an experience of presence. It is that sense of concrete immediacy and impermanence that theater must provide. > There is such a ferment of artistic exploration today, occurring almost entirely below the radar of both mass media and high-culture media. These encounters bring forward the element of music that is more important than sound, of theater that is more important than story, of art that is more important than imagery. That element is people, interacting and present for each other. At each moment we are there to witness an event that has never taken place before and will never take place again. This is true not only of theater but of every instance in life. The key to creativity is other human beings. > There is a word from the South African Bantu language, ubuntu: mutual humanity. In the related Zulu/Xhosa language, they say, “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.” “I am a person through your being a person.” Ubuntu is intimately related to Buddhist ideas of interdependence, and as Archbishop Desmond Tutu explains, it is the opposite of Descartes’ I think, therefore I am. It is the opposite of our idea of the solitary genius-creator-intellect who produces masterpieces in a room. > > Clarence Jones was the speechwriter and close friend who happily watched as Dr. King pushed aside the text he had helped prepare. Jones reports that King had used the phrase I have a dream in a previous speech with little effect on the audience. That day in August of 1963 was different. “The power is not in the words themselves. Nor is it in the speaker. The power was woven into the feedback loop that jumped between the words, the speaker, and his audience.” > > Ubuntu is that feedback, looping around to weave a network of reciprocity. > Improvising makes visible some truths of daily life that we experience but seldom think about: that we can navigate our way through complex systems in the simple act and art of listening and responding; that creativity is the property of everyone and not just of a chosen few; that the ordinary, everyday mind is expressive and creative. From this magical interaction the work is born. > My mentor, the anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bate- son, was fond of repeating the slogan STAMP OUT NOUNS, coined by his friend and student Anatol Holt. “Language,” Gregory told me, “can be a wonderful servant but a terrible master.” Nouns break the world and our experience apart, into things. Naming, and manipulating names and symbols, has enabled the lion’s share of our advanced civilization. But in our love of and reliance on language, we tend to confuse the name with the thing named. Bateson often quoted the mathematician and philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who famously said, “The map is not the territory.” The menu is not the meal. > We sometimes call sheet music the music, whereas it is just a symbolic representation, a helpful aid to communication. The noun music also implies an abstract Platonic entity somewhere up in the ether, where the perfect interpretation exists. We treat the notation or the abstraction as more real than reality. Beethoven’s music becomes a mental deity. But in reality Beethoven’s music, represented on paper, is the archaeological relic of Beethoven’s musicking, a warm human creating, writing, playing, singing, raging in frustration, scratching out notations he didn’t like and writing more, exploding in joy. The editing of a composition, a book, or an architectural drawing is similarly the interactivity of a warm human body in space and time, though the end result may look like a solid object. > Christopher Small, a musicologist strongly influenced by Bateson, suggested that people fundamentally distort music by treating it as a thing; he wanted to get rid of the noun music and replace it with the verb to music, or musicking. Musicking is the real-time activity of grabbing instruments and playing, singing, writing, hearing, tapping on kitchen utensils, dancing. At the moment of listening to a concert, recording, or broadcast, people are linked in participation with others near and far, including the performers. Musicking reframes song as an activity taking place in a particular time and context; it is a process. > I am not a writer — I am writing. Yesterday I was not writing. I was doing dreary errands and engaging in distraction, entertainment, and memories. It is natural to write sometimes and not to write at others. Rimbaud wrote, and then he didn’t write. But if I stick with nouns — “I am a writer” — then a frustrating day like yesterday would have to be framed as “writer’s block” — a disease for which I seek a cure. By treating activities or states as though they were solid objects, we buy a world of trouble. > Every profession — musician, publisher, professor, police detective, physician, builder — has built up expertise, necessary for functioning in the world. Yet every form of expertise produces a counter-condition in which we become limited by the filters. We know what’s right; we know what works; we know. And therefore we sometimes cannot see what is right in front of our noses. > And so the famous words of Suzuki-roshi: “If your mind is empty, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.” > Stamping out nouns is not a call for an exotic restructuring of language; it is an invitation to see and speak about the world as active process. We can use the terms and procedures of daily life without getting stuck in them. Then we can use language with pleasure and integrity. The reduction of anything, including activities we most love, into commodities and objects, the tendency for the lava of life to be frozen into stone by language and thought, means that we need to stamp out nouns as a continuous practice. To be a verb is a full-time occupation, like breathing. > Our right as free human beings is not to be branded. That is where improvisation in life and art meets our daily experience. Improvising means freedom from branding. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, not having thoughts planted in us by entities not of our choosing. Part of an improviser’s work is negative: stomping on nouns, stomping on dreams of polished perfection, stomping on preconceptions of how things are supposed to be. To what extent can that stomping be a dance, with its own shape, its own wild grace, its own life-giving awareness of what and who is around us? Stamp, stomp, squish. It is great exercise for the legs, the whole body, and puts a spring in your step. With twenty-six bones in each foot, twenty muscles, and more than eighty ten- dons and ligaments, the combinations and permutations, the fresh, invigorating styles of stomping, are nearly infinite. > The practice of intent listening, which we will encounter in a later chapter — paying attention to birds, to water, to industrial sounds, to the human sounds around us, to our partners in conversation — seems like the easiest thing in the world. But it is amazing how much we miss. Something else is always going on amid the endless tape-loops of consciousness. Remembering, repeating, and rehearsing clog up our ability to listen. We retell our inventory of hope, fear, anger, triumph, resentment, and jokes. > Fine musicians and artists teaching master classes, with the best of intentions, often fall into the trap of making helpful suggestions. It is much more challenging to allow the mistakes to hang silently in the air and instead have the students speak about what they enjoyed in each other’s performances. Reinforce what was interesting, and it will be stronger next time. Once a nurturing environment has been established, it is possible to give and receive criticism without wounding. Even then, it is better to use our discernment to find the good, the interesting elements in the work, the edge of exploration that leads to the next work. > Improvising is trial and error smoothly flowing. For that to work, error has to be free from clenching or regret, so that our learning process can swing easily from each step to the next. The more we accept mistakes as part of the natural flow of our activity, the more we will be able to incorporate them, use them to build stronger and more interesting structures. In the flow of music, the “bad” note can be deliberately repeated, now as a bridge to something new, building a new modulation around it. Our partners can pick it up and toss it around in a freshly expanded game. > When the adults realized what was happening, they all sat in a circle. The young performer teetered and wobbled from the outstretched arms of one adult to another — ooo’s, ahs, smiles, cheers and hand claps all around the circle. There was a huge, beaming smile on the child’s face. Not a single adult thought of saying, “That was lovely (insert your own name), now if you could just hold your back a little straighter and lift your knees higher, you will walk even better the next time.” Why not? The child certainly was not walking well. Yet we, the adults, knew that the child would continue to develop, on their own, the skills of walking, of running, skipping, hopping and other forms of exciting locomotion. > > - Al Wunder, Positive Feedback Only, The Wonder of Improvising > Voice and body are the oldest toys. In an age of high technology, they remain the ultimate toys. Artistic experience that seems frivolous may also allow people entry into a state of being profoundly present with each other and themselves. > I have long come to think of the violin and bow as a kind of polygraph machine for the heart — truth detector, lie detector, registering minute vibrations of muscle and nerve, revealing a subconscious world of information and feeling. So it is for the vocal chords and breath, all the tones and noises we make, revealing subtle patterns that cannot be expressed in mere words. > Analog means continuously variable, the way your finger can slide freely up the strings of a violin; digital means discrete or discontinuous like the keys on a piano. The analog elements of language cannot be codified by the alphabet and lexical meaning; they classify, contextualize, and connect. The letters of the alphabet are digital coding: there is no letter that slides halfway between A and B. But the way I say A is analog and fluid, carrying mood in tone and timing. The ways in which I might widen my eyes while saying mood are infinitely variable. > > When we play music, we are deep beneath the sea of paralanguage, where sounds don’t have strict meanings; yet they are eloquent, intense, and in some cases incommunicable through ordinary means. This makes it sound as though music is purely analog. However, in reality, like life itself, music is compounded of analog and digital elements, depending on your vantage point, much like the simultaneous existence of light as wave and particle. Jazz and blues musicians are trained to improvise over “the changes,” meaning the change of an underlying chord, let’s say from A7 to D9. But the first principle of life is that everything changes. Every millisecond, and in every direction, we are surrounded by changes, and often the changes come not in abrupt binary switches but in gradient spectral shifts, slowly morphing, with the infinite variability of widened eyes. Can we play life’s changes, transitioning between phases as smoothly as the blackbird swoops down to land on a scraggy field in a seamless arc, or the infant boy as he rolls his Rs from a high pitch down to a low growl? > "Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears." — Pauline Oliveros > To improvise, listen. You need nothing else. A friend who runs a children’s theater came to a concert of improvised music. She later said that she had never seen two adults paying attention to each other as intently as she had that evening. When the music has no score, then listening is the score. > Listening, we begin to develop a feeling for our exosomatic brain and body, extending toward larger reaches of space and time. Sound is touch at a distance. Awareness of context is a baby step toward wisdom. All events take place surrounded by larger, irreproducible layers of context. Yes, we know this, but to feel it is a further step in developing consciousness. The uniqueness of every location, of each person or combination of people — this is the raw material of improvising. > Whether it is Jackson Pollock’s drippings — the dynamic trace of a man crouching and jumping around a canvas on the floor with a can of paint in his hand — or a rap song or a handmade table, art is, as Bateson put it, form secreted from process. The bodies of living beings, the sounds we make, the artworks we make, are secreted from a process of movement, touch, and interplay, which is life. That is what we’re doing, whether we’re receiving the art or making the art. Of course creating and receiving are inseparable arcs of the same feedback loop. > Cage told me that he distrusted improvisation because it bears the imprint of one’s predilections and habits, and he wanted to create work beyond the control of the ego, to be led into a new experience rather than affirming and reinforcing existing habits. He said that he was not interested in art as self-expression but as self-alteration. I then asked him about mushrooms. Cage was an avid and authoritative mycologist. Part of his extensive collection is now housed at the University of Cali- fornia in Santa Cruz. He got into this field because when he was a student a teacher said to him, John, you are so intent on music; try to be more well-rounded. John went home from this encounter, and in his already trademark fashion looked up music in the dictionary and then looked above it on the page. The first word that caught his eye was mushroom. Off he went, hunting, classifying, studying, and cooking them. So I asked him that afternoon, as the dot matrix printers clacked away, “John, when you’re in the woods picking mushrooms, and you decide which ones to eat and which ones are poisonous, do you throw the I Ching, or do you use your knowledge and experience of mushrooms?” > > He gave me that broad, beatific grin of his, lighting up the room. “Ah,” he said. > I walked into a store in New York City. A middle-aged Japanese saleswoman came to help me. After I bought what I had come for, we talked for a while, and on a hunch I asked her, “Can you tell me something about wabi-sabi?” Mariko an- swered that people in Japan feel that wabi-sabi is an essential element of life but no one can define it. Then she defined it. She said, spreading her hands wide, one palm up, one palm down, that wabi-sabi is balance. Balance between happy and unhappy. Balance between growing and decaying. Everything changes. She said it has a lot to do with music, because while no one can define wabi-sabi in words, it can be communicated in music. > In this postmodern age we find ourselves enmeshed in civil wars, tribal prejudices that we thought we had outgrown long ago. We can dare to counter the spirit of hate and separation with the romantic view of connectedness. I am calling for a new romanticism. At the beginning of the nineteenth century we had Blake and Beethoven and Keats and all those visionaries, striving against the bloodshed and stupidity of a warlike time. That is what I want to evoke in the spirit of this book, a creed of love, people to people, people to nature, across time.