One result of the pandemic is that I’m actually able to attend author events at the same frequency I did before I had children. Last week I watched Edward Carey discuss writing and drawing his re-telling of Geppetto’s time in the belly of the whale, The Swallowed Man (and one of my favorite reads of last spring), while highlighting treasures from the Ransom Center here in Austin, Texas. (You can watch the whole talk on YouTube.) Here are my notes:
Last weekend I invited one of my favorite writers, Sam Anderson, staff writer at the NYTimes and author of the fabulous book Boom Town, to celebrate Montaigne’s birthday with me on Instagram Live. I ended up with a tour of Sam’s library in his converted garage and a long chat about the guardian spirits that inspire his workspace, his dictionary stand, the magic of blind contour drawings, the calm of collage, how he writes nonfiction, the writing exercise he warms up with every morning, and yes, our shared love for Montaigne. You can watch the whole thing on IGTV.
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The story goes that the painter Al Held said, “Conceptual art is just pointing at things,” so John Baldessari decided to take him literally, and commissioned a bunch of amateur painters to paint realistic paintings of hands pointing at things:
Of course, all art is, in a sense, pointing at things! The artist sees something and she points to it so you can see it, too.
Hedda Sterne, in an interview with Art in America, said she thought art was about, saying, “Hey, look!”
The intention, the purpose, is not to show your talent but to show something…. I had a very great urgency to show, to share. The cat brings you in things, you know? It was that kind of thing. I discovered things and wanted to share them.
Something similar from Corita Kent: “I just make things I like bigger.”
Sterne emphasized that she pointed away from herself. To Bomb magazine: “I see myself as a well-working lens, a perceiver of something that exists independently of me: don’t look at me, look at what I’ve found.”
It’s the same for writers: Good writing is often just pointing at things.
In his most recent newsletter, Oliver Burkeman suggests that people who want to make writing less hard should just think about showing people something that you’ve noticed. “Look, over there,” your writing should ask, “can you see?
“When you write,” says Steven Pinker, “you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that’s interesting, that you are directing the attention of your reader to that thing in the world, and that you are doing so by means of conversation.”
“Which sounds obvious,” says Burkeman, “except that it makes immediately clear how many writers are doing something else.”
Academics are often more focused on showing off their knowledge, or their membership in an exclusive circle…. Journalists are often trying to inflame your anger, or rally support for some cause.
“The reader wants to see,” Burkeman says, “your job is to do the pointing.”
It is the same for blogging, says Robin Rendle: “blogging is pointing at things and falling in love.” (I like his ordering: not falling in love and then pointing, but pointing and then falling in love. Loving something by paying attention to it.)
As I wrote in Steal Like An Artist,
“Step 1: Wonder at something.
Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.”
Point at things, say, “whoa,” and elaborate.
“It’s simple,” writes George Leonard in the “The Master and the Fool,” the epilogue of his book Mastery, “To be a learner, you’ve got to be willing to be a fool.”
By fool, to be clear, I don’t mean a stupid, unthinking person, but one with the spirit of the medieval fool, the court jester, the carefree fool in the tarot deck who bears the awesome number zero, signifying the fertile void from which all creation springs, the state of emptiness that allows new things to come into being.
“Consider for a moment,” he continues, “the learnings in life you’ve forfeited because your parents, your peers, your school, your society, have not allowed you to be playful, free, and foolish in the learning process.”
If you share a home with anybody long enough, eventually, you will be revealed to be the fool that you are. “Everybody plays the fool sometime / There’s no exception to the rule.” I think a happy home is one in which each member’s individual foolishness is tolerated, maybe even encouraged and developed, but, no matter what, loved. We all live with fools, and we must “suffer them gladly” in order to let them grow. And if we want to grow, we, too, must learn to play the fool, and suffer ourselves gladly.
In his book Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton writes:
There is an apostolic injunction to suffer fools gladly. We always lay the stress on the word ‘suffer,’ and interpret the passage as one urging resignation. It might be better, perhaps, to lay the stress upon the word ‘gladly,’ and make our familiarity with fools a delight, and almost a dissipation. Nor is it necessary that our pleasure in fools (or at least in great and godlike fools) should be merely satiric or cruel. The great fool is he in whom we cannot tell which is the conscious and which the unconscious humour; we laugh with him and laugh at him at the same time. An obvious instance is that of ordinary and happy marriage. A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool. This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring basis of affection, and even of respect.
Emphasis mine. I love this passage, and I’ve been thinking about it for days. My own marriage is a comedy of survival, one of shared jokes and shared foolishness. My wife has let me be the fool I am to learn what I need to learn.
But nothing has taught me about the connection between learning and foolishness more than sharing a house for the past 8 years with my little pint-sized artists, who seem to show more creativity in one day than I do in a month.
Here is how Tom Vanderbilt puts it in his new book, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning:
Children, in a very real sense, have beginners’ minds, open to wider possibilities. They see the world with fresher eyes, are less burdened with preconception and past experience, and are less guided by what they know to be true. They are more likely to pick up details that adults might discard as irrelevant. Because they’re less concerned with being wrong or looking foolish, children often ask questions that adults won’t ask.
“Beginner’s mind” is a reference to Suzuki’s wonderful book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, which I quoted in Show Your Work!: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
In that book I also wrote that mastery isn’t enough for the searching life of the artist. “You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again.” (In some cases, literally: I’m thinking of Erik Satie, going back to the academy after he was already known as a composer.) And this starting over, or beginning again, learning something new, requires a willingness to look like a fool, or a “curious idiot.”
In one of his letters to Reginald Golding Bright collected in Advice to a Young Critic, the playwright George Bernard Shaw encouraged the aspiring writer to “resolutely” make a fool of himself:
You say you are scarcely competent to write books just yet. That is just why I recommend you to learn. If I advised you to learn to skate, you would not reply that your balance was scarcely good enough yet. A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself. You will never write a good book until you have written some bad ones.
In any new venture, you must be willing to be bad for as long as it takes.
Elsewhere, when Shaw was asked how he became a great orator, he replied, “I learned to speak as men learn to skate or to cycle—by doggedly making a fool of myself until I got used to it.”
If you can resolutely, doggedly, learn to play the fool, you will learn how to learn again.
Here is one of my prized possessions: a letter from the late, great writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks. He sent it to me in 2014, after seeing my drawing of his book, Musicophilia:
I was thinking this weekend about how much he would’ve liked the documentary My Octopus Teacher. (Note his letterhead above. He loved cephalopods and considered them kindred spirits — they’re smart and they surround themselves with ink! “They called me Inky as a boy,” he wrote in his memoir, On The Move, “and I still seem to get as ink stained as I did seventy years ago.”)
I also rewatched this wonderful video of him showing off his writing desk:
I want company, even if it’s inorganic…I think some of the happiest years of my life were between 10 and 14 when I had a passion for chemistry in general, and metals, in particular. And now, I’ve left my hometown, and my parents are dead, and my brothers are dead, and so much of the past is gone…this rather childlike, chemical bench-like desk appeals to me, gives me some comfort, and makes me feel at home.
I count myself extremely fortunate to possess a letter in his hand. His obituary noted that he received over 10,000 letters a year. He called it an “intercourse with the world,” and said, “I invariably reply to people under 10, over 90 or in prison.” I fit none of those criteria, and I still had the honor.
To my shame, I never wrote back. I had just moved studios and I couldn’t find the drawing and I didn’t want to write back to him until I found it. By the time I did find the drawing I read that he had terminal cancer and I didn’t want to bother him. Just one of my regrets…
Now all I can do is celebrate him by sharing his work and writing back as much as I can. (I look forward to the forthcoming documentary.)
Filed under: Oliver Sacks
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