Schedule

August 26, 2010  Tom R's presentation will be based on Free Play, Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch, Tarcher/Putnam 1990
Click Read More below to see an attached chapter we will be discussing. Also there is an excerpt from Being Wrong which we will be discussing also.

Sept 2nd   Bake Off

Sept 9th  Gary will present Chapter 3 from Thomas Merton's book: No Man Is An Island.

Sept 16th Judy has presenters coming to discuss the Middle Eastern controversy. 

Sept 23rd Paul N. will present "Why?"

Sept 30th, Gunther Pohlmann Society.
Being Wrong Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

October 1, Bake Off

October 7, Eric W will present or else next week on the 14th. Exact week will be announced.

October 14, Eric W. will present.

October 21, History of Marriage by Tom R.

Excerpt: from Being Wrong


Why is it so fun to be right? As pleasures go, it is, after all, a second-order one at best. Unlike many of life's other delights - chocolate, surfing, kissing - it does not enjoy any mainline access to our biochemistry: to our appetites, our adrenal glands, our limbic systems, our swoony hearts. And yet, the thrill of being right is undeniable, universal, and (perhaps most oddly) almost entirely undiscriminating. We can't enjoy kissing just anyone, but we can relish being right about almost anything. The stakes don't seem to matter much; it is more important to bet on the right foreign policy than the right racehorse, but we are perfectly capable of gloating over either one. Nor does subject matter; we can be just as pleased about correctly identifying an orange-crowned warbler as correctly identifying the sexual orientation of our coworker. Stranger still, we are perfectly capable of deriving satisfaction from being right about disagreeable things: the downturn in the stock market, say, or the demise of a friend's relationship, or the fact that, at our spouse's insistence, we just spent fifteen minutes schlepping our suitcase in exactly the opposite direction from our hotel.

Like most delectable experiences, rightness is not ours to enjoy all the time. Sometimes, we are the one who loses the bet (or the hotel). And sometimes, too, we are plagued by doubt about the correct answer or course of action - an anxiety that, itself, reflects the urgency of our desire to be right. On the whole, though, and notwithstanding these lapses and qualms, our indiscriminate enjoyment of being right is matched by an almost equally indiscriminate feeling that we are right. At times, this feeling spills into the foreground, as when we argue or evangelize, make predictions or place bets. Often, though, it is just psychological backdrop. Most of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

This serene faith in our own rightness is often warranted. Most of us navigate day-to-day life fairly well, after all, which suggests that we are routinely right about a great many things. And sometimes we are not just routinely right but spectacularly right: right about the existence of atoms (postulated by ancient thinkers thousands of years before the emergence of modern chemistry); right about the healing properties of aspirin (known since at least 3000 BC); right to track down that woman who smiled at you in the cafe (now your wife of twenty years). Taken together, these moments of rightness represent both the high-water marks of human endeavor and the source of countless small joys. They affirm our sense of being smart, competent, trustworthy, and in tune with our environment. More important, they keep us alive. Individually and collectively, our very existence depends on our ability to reach accurate conclusions about the world around us. In short, the experience of being right is imperative for our survival, gratifying for our ego, and, overall, one of life's cheapest and keenest satisfactions.

This book is about the opposite of all that. It is about being wrong: about how we as a culture think about error, and how we as individuals cope when our convictions collapse out from under us. If we relish being right and regard it as our natural state, you can guess how we feel about being wrong. For one thing, we tend to view it as rare and bizarre - an inexplicable aberration in the normal order of things. For another, it leaves us feeling idiotic and ashamed. Like the term paper returned to us covered in red ink, being wrong makes us cringe and slouch down in our seats; it makes our heart sink and our dander rise. At best we regard it as a nuisance, at worst a nightmare, but in either case – and quite unlike the gleeful little rush of being right – we experience our errors as deflating and embarrassing.

And it gets worse. In our collective imagination, error is associated not just with shame and stupidity but also with ignorance, indolence, psychopathology, and moral degeneracy. This set of associations was nicely summed up by the Italian cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, who noted that we err because of (among other things) "inattention, distraction, lack of interest, poor preparation, genuine stupidity, timidity, braggadocio, emotional imbalance, ... ideological, racial, social or chauvinistic prejudices, as well as aggressive or prevaricatory instincts." In this view - and it is the common one - our errors are evidence of our gravest social, intellectual, and moral failings.

Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.

Given this centrality to both our intellectual and emotional development, error shouldn't be an embarrassment, and cannot be an aberration. On the contrary. As Benjamin Franklin observed in the quote that heads this book, wrongness is a window into normal human nature – into our imaginative minds, our boundless faculties, our exttravagant souls. This book is staked on the soundness of that observation: that however disorienting, difficult, or humbling our mistakes might be, it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.

http://beingwrongbook.com/excerpt




Free Play, Improvisation in Life and Art

Stephen Nachmanovitch, 1990



The Power of Mistakes pp. 88—93


Do not fear mistakes. There are none.

Miles Davis



Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.

M. C. Richards



We all know how pearls are made. When a grain of grit accidentally slips into an oyster’s shell, the oyster encysts it, secreting more and more of a thick, smooth mucus that hardens in microscopic layer after layer over the foreign irritation until it becomes a perfectly smooth, round, hard, shiny thing of beauty. The oyster thereby transforms both the grit and itself into something new, transforming the intrusion of error or otherness into its system, completing the gestalt according to its own oyster nature.

If the oyster had hands, there would be no pearl. Because the oyster is forced to live with the irritation for an extended period of time, the pearl comes to be.

In school, in the workplace, in learning an art or sport, we are taught to fear, hide, or avoid mistakes. But mistakes are of incalculable value to us. There is first the value of mistakes as the raw material of learning. If we don’t make mistakes, we are unlikely to make anything at all. Tom Watson, for many years the head of IBM, said, “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.” But more important, mistakes and accidents can be the irritating grains that become pearls; they present us with unforeseen opportunities, they are fresh sources of inspiration in and of themselves. We come to regard our obstacles as ornaments, as opportunities to be exploited and explored.

Seeing and using the power of mistakes does not mean that anything goes. Practice is rooted in self-correction and refinement, working toward clearer and more reliable technique. But when a mistake occurs we can treat it either as an invaluable piece of data about our technique or as a grain of sand around which we can make a pearl.

Freud illuminated the fascinating way in which slips of the tongue reveal unconscious material. The unconscious is the very bread and butter of the artist, so mistakes and slips of all kinds are to be treasured as priceless information from beyond and within.

As our craft and life develop toward greater clarity and deeper individuation, we begin to have an eye for spotting these essential accidents. We can use the mistakes we make, the accidents of fate, and even weaknesses in our own makeup that can be turned to advantage.

Often the process of our artwork is thrown onto a new track by the inherent balkiness of the world. Murphy’s law states that if anything can go wrong, it will. Performers experience this daily and hourly. When dealing with instruments, tape recorders, projectors, computers, sound systems, and theater lights, there are inevitable breakdowns before a performance. A performer can become sick. A valued assistant can quit at the last minute, or lose his girlfriend and become mentally incapacitated. Often it is these very accidents that give rise to the most ingenious solutions, and sometimes to off-the-cuff creativity of the highest order.

Equipment breaks down, it is Sunday night, the stores are all closed, and the audience is arriving in an hour. You are forced to do a little bricolage, improvising some new and crazy contraption. Then you attain some of your best moments. Ordinary objects or trash suddenly become valuable working materials, and your perceptions of what you need and what you don’t need radically shift. Among the things I love so much about performing are those totally unforeseen, impossible calamities. In life, as in a Zen koan, we create by shifting our perspective to the point at which interruptions are the answer. The redirection of attention involved in incorporating the accident into the flow of our work frees us to see the interruption freshly, and find the alchemical gold in it.

Once I was preparing for a full evening poetry performance, with multiscreen slide projections and electronic music I had composed on tape for the occasion. But in the course of overrehearsing during the preceding week, I managed to give myself a case of laryngitis, and woke up the morning of the performance with a ruined voice and a high fever. I was ready to cancel, but in the end decided that would be no fun. Instead I dropped my attachment to my music and preempted the sound system for use as a P.A. I sat in an old wicker wheelchair and croaked into a microphone. My soft, spooky, obsessive, guttural voice, amplified, became an instrument of qualities that totally surprised me, releasing me to find a hitherto unsuspected depth in my own poetic line.

A “mistake” on the violin: I have been playing some pattern: 1, 2, 3, 6; 1, 2, 3, 6. Suddenly I make a slip and play 1, 2, 3, 7, 6. It doesn’t matter to me at the time whether I’ve broken a rule or not; what matters is what I do in the next tenth of a second. I can adopt the traditional attitude, treating what I have done as a mistake; don’t do it again, hope it doesn’t happen again, and in the meantime, feel guilty. Or I can repeat it, amplify it, develop it further until it becomes a new pattern. Or beyond that I can drop neither the old pattern nor the new one but discover the unforeseen context that includes both of them.

An “accident” on the violin: I am playing outdoors at night, in misty hills. Romantic? Yes. But also humid. The cold and the humidity take all the poop out of the bottom string, which suddenly slackens and goes out of tune. Out of tune with what? Out of tune with my preconceived benchmark of “in tune.” Again I can take the same three approaches. I can tune it back up and pretend that nothing happened. This is what politicians cal “toughing it out.” I can play the flabby string as is, finding the new harmonies and textures it contains. A low, thick string, when it goes flabby, not only becomes lower in pitch, but because of the flabbiness will give to the bow’s weight much more easily and will produce (if lightly touched) more breathy and resonant tones than a normal string. I can have a lot of fun down there in the viola’s tonal sub-basement. Or I can detune it even further, until it comes into some new and interesting harmonic relation with the other strings (scordatura, a technique the old Italian violinists were fond of). Now I have, instantly, a brand-new instrument with a new and different sonic shape.

An “accident” in computer graphics: I am playing with a paint program, which enables me to create visual art on the screen and then store it on disk as data that can be called up later. I intend to call up the art I was working on yesterday, but I hit the wrong key and call up the zip code index of my mailing list. The thousands of zip codes, transformed into a single glowing screen of abstract color and pattern, turn out as a startling and beautiful scene of other-worldly microscopic life. From this serendipitous blunder evolves a technique that I use to create dozens of new artworks.

The history of science, as we well know, is liberally peppered with stories of essential discoveries seeded by mistakes and accidents: Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, thanks to the dust-borne mold that contaminated his Petri dish; Roentgen’s discovery of X rays, thanks to the careless handling of a photographic plate. Time after time, the quirks and mishaps that one might be tempted to reject as “bad data” are often the best. Many spiritual traditions point up the vitality we gain by reseeding the value of what we may have rejected as insignificant: “The stone which the builders refused,” sing the Psalms of David, “has come to be the cornerstone.”

The power of mistakes enables us to reframe creative blocks and turn them around. Sometimes the very sin of omission or commission for which we’ve been kicking ourselves may be the seed of our best work. (In Christianity they speak of this realization as felix culpa, the fortunate fall.) The troublesome parts of our work, the parts that are most baffling and frustrating, are in fact the growing edges. We see these opportunities the instant we drop our preconceptions and our self-importance.

Life throws at us innumerable irritations that can be mobilized for pearl making, including all the irritating people who come our way. Occasionally we are stuck with a petty tyrant who makes our life hell. Sometimes these situations, while miserable at the time, cause us to sharpen, focus, and mobilize our inner resources in the most surprising ways. We become, then, no longer victims of circumstance, but able to use circumstance as the vehicle of creativity. This is the well-known principle of Jujitsu, taking your opponent’s blows and using their own energy to deflect them to your advantage. When you fall, you raise yourself by pushing against the spot where you fell.

The Vietnamese Buddhist poet-priest, Thich Nhat Hang, devised an interesting telephone meditation. The sound of the telephone ringing, and our semiautomatic instinct to jump up and answer it, seem the very opposite of meditation. Ring and reaction bring out the essence of the choppy, nervous character of the way time is lived in our world. He says use the first ring as a reminder, in the midst of whatever you were doing, of mindfulness, a reminder of breath, and of your own center. Use the second and third rings to breathe and smile. If the caller wants to talk, he or she will wait for the fourth ring, and you will be ready. What Tich Nhat Hanh is saying here is that mindfulness, practice, and poetry in life are not to be reserved for a time and place where everything is perfect; we can use the very instruments of society’s nervous pressures on us to relieve the pressure. Even under the sound of helicopters—and this is a man who buried many children in Vietnam to the roar of helicopters and bombs—he can say, “Listen, listen; this sound brings me back to my true self.