The Grasshopper #3: Confusion
When things get overturned
image copyright Martin Edic 2021
In this edition I look at the role of confusion or chaos in the creative process. I used to worry when I found myself ‘in the weeds’ while gathering facts and starting to learn about something new. Now I know it is a sign of progress.
“There must be some kind of way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief.”
Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower
Masks, Ukraine, politics, the Pandemic. There’s a lot of strange shit going down out there. When a guy shoots up a subway car in Brooklyn, we quickly learn that he was consumed by anger. He posted rants online about how he just wanted to kill people. From what I can tell it wasn’t exactly clear why or what he was angry about.
I think he was confused, very confused. A lot of us are. I deal with it by reading and watching a lot of news and writing about what I see. But that writing is not the writing you’ll find me doing here. My goal here is to explore change, and confusion is often the trigger that sets off change, hopefully useful change, not destroying things like that sad man in the subway.
Motivational:
You Have To Make a Mess First
Out of chaos, order
Change is not a thing, it is a process. In spite of all the advice we get about goals and planning and gradual progress towards an end, the reality of real change is different. Instead of the clarity of vision we hope for, most change begins in the realm of confusion.
When we are learning something new, lots of unfamiliar facts and ideas come at us. Then, as we sift through the basics we start to do things based on those facts and ideas. If the new thing we are learning is a skill we have to develop physical dexterity, to start to feel that skill as more accomplished practitioners do.
It’s no different with a new concept. Clarity rarely appears early on, and if it does, it is often mistaken or overly simplistic, a setback of sorts. But all of this early learning confusion is serving a purpose. Beneath the clutter,a sort of framework appears, consisting of both new information and new experience, which together start to become a basic expertise. We are no longer beginners.
This definitely applies to the creative arts. We all know the stories of a young savant who hits a creative home run early in their career and then fails to follow up on an equal level. A one hit wonder if you will.
Typically this happens because that young savant had a highly meaningful experience of some sort and that drove their successful first effort. But they skipped by the confusion stage and went straight into perceived expertise. But the framework or foundation for a body of work was not there.
My way of dealing with this, once I saw how it worked with the help of others and teachers and personal experience, was to always try to stay in the beginner mind as long as I could. If you can do that you’ll find that when you do start to reach a level of competency it will be deeper and much more useful as you continue.
Practical
Learn to Cook Before You Learn to Write
Do you dirty every dish in the house to make a simple meal?
I used to. I’d invite friends over for dinner and when we ate I’d herd everyone out of the kitchen and not let the party head back in there, for two reasons. First, the place always looked like a small bomb went off. Stacked dirty pans in the sink, vegetable trimmings on the cutting board, various spills and splashes of food on everything. It was a big mess.
And I did not want my guests offering to help clean up. It’s my belief that when you have people over for dinner it should be a relaxing treat, not a marathon of dishwashing.
The meals were usually pretty good because I love to cook, read cookbooks, and try new things. I’d worked in kitchens and a bakery and my knife technique was decent. But that mess said that I really didn’t know how to cook at the next level.
And, in the midst of all that chaos, I’d often forget some important ingredient and have to improvise, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
Around that same period in my life, I wrote a book proposal and got a deal to write a how to book about marketing. I got that deal because I wrote a really comprehensive proposal with a detailed outline (one entire page for each chapter), a marketing plan, a bio that read like good ad copy, and a market analysis. About 35 pages all together.
It was the most organized thing I’d ever done and it sold to the first publisher I sent it to, in part because I’d done a lot of research on them too. I got a decent advance for the time and subject. More importantly, I did two more books for that publisher and the third one sold for twenty years, netting me a nice passive income from royalties.
Obviously my cooking self did not learn much from my writing self. But then I was at a dinner party and watched my hostess effortlessly fill a table with great food. And when she was done her kitchen was not a mess. Dishes from the table went into the dishwasher and everything else was already cleaned.
And I had an epiphany. I could clean as I went. I could prep everything ahead and have each ingredient ready in its own little dish, a process known as mis en place, French for everything in its place.
And I learned timing because that prep gave me breathing space to figure out how to pace things so everything came together at the right time. And that breathing space meant I could rinse out my prep dishes and pans and clean up as I went.
I had moved up to the next level as a home cook.
You might ask what this all has to do with confusion and creativity. We’ve all seen those pictures of artist studios with paint sloshed everywhere, dried up palettes and stacked paper and canvases. Or the writer’s desk piled high with papers and books until there is barely a place for a coffee cup. There are probably a few dirty coffee cups somewhere in there too.
I can no longer work like that. These days I seldom work from outlines and I no longer write detailed proposals, but I am no less organized in my writing. I have developed a morning routine that has me reading certain news sources in the morning, checking the stats on my readers, and eventually shifting over to writing.
I’m doing it right now.
But what about going with the flow, just letting inspiration lead you to something great? Sorry, my inspiration these days comes from that routine, the mis en place I use to get me into writing mode. It doesn’t matter if it’s fiction or non-fiction, though with fiction you have to learn to open yourself to where the words want to go.
There is a routine to that too. In music, you can’t improvise until your skills and ear reach a certain level of expertise through practice, writing, and trying different things, most of which probably won’t work. Eventually you find yourself hearing where things can go and following that path.
Confusion may be a starting point, but once you gain some skill, you realize that you have to find your way out of confusion and into disciplined practice to get to the next level.
Not just to even know what the next level is, to be able to recognize it when you get there. It is probably a lot less messy than you might have thought.
Different
Beginner Mind After Forty Years
Are you a crooked cucumber?
The famed Zen teacher, Shunryu Suzuki (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and the San Francisco Zen Center) was a prodigy of sorts. He joined a monastery in Japan at an early age and in his early twenties found himself an Abbot after his teacher passed away.
Being an Abbot of a large monastery in Japan is often a more administrative and political role than a spiritual one, not unlike being the leader of a large church here. Suzuki Roshi did not want to be an administrator, he was a believer in the practice of simple meditation rather than internal politics and power struggles.
His teacher recognized this and his nickname for Suzuki was Crooked Cucumber, the cuke that is fine to eat, but not suitable for market, especially if the market is in Japan where beauty in everything is measured by perfection, even in cucumbers. The crooked cucumber is one that went its own way.
Suzuki came to America in the early sixties, speaking little English and with few connections here. And he left a prestigious role in the Zen universe in Japan. But he felt that Zen in his country had become too rigid and removed from the basic practice where it had its origins. He thought that here he might be able to strip away the ceremony and help others get to the heart of things.
American ideas about Buddhism and Zen were mired in confusion and myth then, driven by the beats and the Buddhist mishmash of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and others who had dipped into many aspects, but failed to integrate them.
Even ‘serious’ Zen in America was a little too absorbed in stern teachings and a kind of perfectionism and competitive attitude.
Suzuki Roshi started a small Soto Zen practice in San Francisco that focused on simple breathing meditation, not a lot of dogma. It became the Zen Center of SF and he eventually started Tassajara which became a retreat for practice in the outdoors, including gardening, cooking, and building as meditative practice.
After his death in the early seventies, his followers transcribed tapes of his teachings and edited them into a simple book called Zen Mind, Beginner Mind which went on to sell over a million copies. I have dozens of books on Buddhism, but it is the one I’d take to a desert island.
A perfect example of taking a complex topic, Buddhism, and reducing it to pure simplicity, without sacrificing its depth and power.
Not bad for a crooked cucumber!
“The Buddha once spoke of what he called the eight worldly winds. Gain and loss, fame and disgrace, praise and blame, and pleasure and pain spin the world, he said, and the world spins after them. These eight winds blow through everyone’s lives, no matter how much we have meditated or how accomplished we have become. They challenge us endlessly: we instinctively recoil from the discomfort they create yet chase after the ego gratification they promise. The Buddha suggested that this ties us unnecessarily to the vagaries of worldly life. The eight winds come and go ceaselessly; as much as we try to pick and choose among them, it is impossible to have some without the others. While we cannot stop them, with enough foresight we can learn to relate to them differently. Desirable things do not have to beguile the mind, and undesirable ones do not have to bring endless resistance. We can let the winds blow through us instead of letting them buffet us about.”
Dr. Mark Epstein, How Meditation Failed Me from Tricycle Magazine