15. October 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

This morning I came across this letter from Martha Graham  to Agnes DeMille, both dancers that left a long trail of amazing choreography, works which are not only still being performed, but which arguably form the backbone of  some dance companies’ repertoire.

A Letter to Agnes De Mille

There is a vitality,
a life force,
a quickening
that is translated through you into action,
and because there is only one of you in all time,
this expression is unique.

And If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.
The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine
how good it is
nor how valuable it is
nor how it compares with other expressions.

It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly
to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.
You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate YOU.

Keep the channel open…
No artist is pleased…

There is no satisfaction whatever at anytime
There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching
and makes “us” MORE alive than the others.

Martha Graham
( - a letter to Agnes De Mille-)

On one level, Graham’s advice strikes me personally, defining my task as a writer.  Stop judging, stop seeing your work through the judgments of others.  Keep the channel open and respond to it, because whatever anyone else thinks of the work, including myself in any given mood, the task, if my unique personhood is to be expressed, is only to keep the channel open.  It’s the kind of advice that any artist must continually return to, other voices being so anxious to shout down the creative impulse. 

On another level, it challenges me to think about both Darwin and Einstein, subjects of my fictional biographies, to think about what they did to keep their channels open.  In Darwin’s case, I’m aware that despite excessive approval-orientation, he produced a work that brought down 150 years of controversy by identifying and connecting to his passion and following wherever it took him.  As a child, he preferred collecting beetles to memorizing Latin vocabulary.  As a young man he incurred the wrath of his father by dropping out of two academic programs–medicine and theology–to go aboard HMS Beagle as the ship’s naturalist, sending back barrels of specimens to be studied by men who were then England’s top naturalists.  He didn’t yet see himself in their company, but as his ideas morphed, he dared to follow where they led, understanding that he had immense problems to solve–such as how species crossed oceans and appeared on different continents.  He built on the work of his predecessors and communicated with his fellow scientists regularly, swapping ideas, and particularly with Joseph Hooker, the botanist that inherited the directorship of Kew Gardens from his father.  And he didn’t allow the fact that he was a less-than-competent writer–Did you ever wonder why you memorize bullet points but don’t read his work in school?–to prevent him pursuing his goal and publishing his work.

What of Einstein?  He began writing papers and publishing in the Annalen, Europe’s most prestigious journal of physics, during the frustrating nearly two-year period when he could not find a teaching job.  Rejected for one teaching post after another, he used his time to immerse himself in the content and arguments of his era’s current thinkers, particularly Boltzmann, Mach, Ostwald, and Lennard.  He kept his mind mulling the problems his contemporaries encountered.  He wrote and published, and though this wasn’t ultimately what opened the door to his job at the Patent Office–a friend’s father did that–he didn’t insist on a direct path.  All of his concentration culminated in an explosion of productivity–five papers in 1905, just two years after he took his job at the Patent Office.  Now granted, Einstein’s brain was different, and we all don’t have that advantage, but there are methods here.  

What have I learned?  

• Identify your passion and follow where it leads. 

• Pursue the passion despite the nay-sayers.

• Don’t allow the immensity of the problem overcome your pursuit.

• Build on your predecessors.

• Cultivate the company of like minds.

• Don’t allow your weaknesses to defeat you.

• Immerse yourself in your materials, even when your path is blocked.

• Don’t insist on one path to your goal.  Walk through open doors, pursuing alternatives.

• When you’ve done these things, wait patiently for the pay-off.

And incidentally, Agnes DeMille was not a very good dancer. 

Posted in Martha Graham, Agnes DeMille, innovation, making art, reading, Einstein, Darwin, genius, writing | 2 Comments »

1. August 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

On Einstein’s death in 1955, his body was taken to an autopsy lab in Princeton, NJ.  He had donated his brain to science, prior to the cremation of his body.  There, Dr. Thomas Harvey removed his brain, then stole it.  He examined it in sections but could find nothing different.  When he finally returned the brain, it was studied further.  Here is a report provided by the Center for History of Physics on the website “How Stuff Works.”

“Inspecting samples that Harvey had carefully preserved, Sandra F. Witelson and colleagues discovered that Einstein’s brain lacked a particular small wrinkle (the parietal operculum) that most people have. Perhaps in compensation, other regions on each side were a bit enlarged; later they were found to have other unusual features. These regions, the inferior parietal lobes, are known to have something to do with visual imagery and mathematical thinking. Thus Einstein was apparently better equipped than most people for a certain type of thinking.”

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17. May 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

“Nothing new comes of thinking about a problem the same way we created it,” Einstein said.  It was a good rationale for his reluctance to repeat experiments and collect data that had already been collected by someone else or to follow the directions for an experimental protocol.  If he was going to repeat an experiment for which results were already on record, he’d invent his own method.   For insisting on doing the experiments his own way, Herr Professor Pernet flunked him in introductory physics lab.  Out of a possible 6, Einstein scored 1.  And given his upstart attitude, it is not surprising, then, that when he graduated, none of his professors would hire him on as an assistant–the usual career trajectory for a graduate of Zurich’s Polytech (the ETH).  

But wasn’t this ability, his inclination to reject existing methods and accepted modes of thought, what enabled him to re-envision various problems in physics, to question the constants that physicists had built upon?  And how difficult this is, accepted thought being so foundational that most of us don’t realize we’ve confused it with truth.

Time, for instance.  It took Einstein to suggest it’s not the universal constant.  (And in the past year, some physicists are theorizing that the speed of light is also not constant, a discovery which, if proven, might lead to the unified field theory Einstein sought.)

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17. May 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

“Nothing new comes of thinking about a problem the same way we created it,” Einstein said.  It was a good rationale for his reluctance to repeat experiments and collect data that had already been collected by someone else or to follow the directions for an experimental protocol.  If he was going to repeat an experiment for which results were already on record, he’d invent his own method.   For insisting on doing the experiments his own way, Herr Professor Pernet flunked him in introductory physics lab.  Out of a possible 6, Einstein scored 1.  And given his upstart attitude, it is not surprising, then, that when he graduated, none of his professors would hire him on as an assistant–the usual career trajectory for a graduate of Zurich’s Polytech (the ETH).  

But wasn’t this ability, his inclination to reject existing methods and accepted modes of thought, what enabled him to re-envision various problems in physics, to question the constants that physicists had built upon?  And how difficult this is, accepted thought being so foundational that most of us don’t realize we’ve confused it with truth.

Time, for instance.  It took Einstein to suggest it’s not the universal constant.  (And in the past year, some physicists are theorizing that the speed of light is also not constant, a discovery which, if proven, might lead to the unified field theory Einstein sought.)

Posted in genius, Einstein | No Comments »

24. February 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

I’m working on a scene where Albert Einstein is playing a largo movement of a Handel sonata for violin and piano. (He was quite an accomplished violinist, and some biographers guess that through his violin he expressed the intimate emotions that he otherwise suppressed in favor of his work in physics.)  I chose the piece after hearing and being transported by it on NPR.  The choice, however, is arbitrary, though Einstein was known to play Handel.  He liked the baroque (Bach, Vivaldi) and classical composers (Mozart, Handel), finding the romantics (Beethoven, Wagner) too sentimental.

Einstein’s mother, Pauline, was an accomplished pianist and introduced Albert to the violin at age 5.  It was not until his pre-teen years, however, when he discovered Mozart, that practicing was anything but another necessary chore, like doing his schoolwork before he was allowed to go outside to play.  Mozart opened another world to him and Albert was grateful to his mother for insisting he learn. The violin opened many doors to him in Zurich, playing music in small groups being a popular evening entertainment among the student group.  Albert found in his violin an alternate absorption which gave him the time off his mind needed to make the intellectual leaps known as the “eureka” experience.

Posted in Violin, Pauline Einstein, genius, Einstein | No Comments »

24. February 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

I’m working on a scene where Albert Einstein is playing a largo movement of a Handel sonata for violin and piano. (He was quite an accomplished violinist, and some biographers guess that through his violin he expressed the intimate emotions that he otherwise suppressed in favor of his work in physics.)  I chose the piece after hearing and being transported by it on NPR.  The choice, however, is arbitrary, though Einstein was known to play Handel.  He liked the baroque (Bach, Vivaldi) and classical composers (Mozart, Handel), finding the romantics (Beethoven, Wagner) too sentimental.

Einstein’s mother, Pauline, was an accomplished pianist and introduced Albert to the violin at age 5.  It was not until his pre-teen years, however, when he discovered Mozart, that practicing was anything but another necessary chore, like doing his schoolwork before he was allowed to go outside to play.  Mozart opened another world to him and Albert was grateful to his mother for insisting he learn. The violin opened many doors to him in Zurich, playing music in small groups being a popular evening entertainment among the student group.  Albert found in his violin an alternate absorption which gave him the time off his mind needed to make the intellectual leaps known as the “eureka” experience.

Posted in Violin, Pauline Einstein, genius, Einstein | No Comments »

12. September 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

I’m still hanging out in the Jurgen Neffe biography of Einstein, where he talks about the recurrent personality traits of geniuses (p. 25) based on research by Howard Gardner of Harvard. Gardner compared Einstein with the likes of Picasso, Freud, and Gandhi, plus three others less known. He discovered in all of them an intersection of the childlike with the mature. Gardner credits Einstein’s parents for leaving him alone with his dream-like childhood existence, the solitude they granted him, with his ability as a mature scientist to revisit and incorporate the “flow” of his childhood years.

Geniuses, Gardner says, require a decade of practical and theoretical work before they blossom. In Einstein’s case, he read and grappled mentally with ideas for ten years before arriving at the special theory of relativity. (FYI: The special theory is distinguished from and is a precursor to the theory of relativity.) Likewise, Einstein’s favorite composer, Mozart, wrote music for ten years before composing anything that made history. And it’s not about IQ. Creative geniuses have IQs well above normal, but the IQ above 150, the super IQ, almost never yields a creative genius, according to Gardner.

Creative geniuses are propelled by a force of will that is characterized by determination and perseverance without boundaries. They meet with disapproval for characteristics like stubbornness. Einstein was not an exceptional student in many subjects (though he excelled in math and physics) but was kicked out of school in Germany for provoking teachers with rebellious contempt. When he claimed he had done nothing wrong, his teacher, Dr. Joseph Degenhart, said, “Your mere presence here undermines the class’s respect for me.”

Genius desires independence of thought, the ability to stand alone on the frontier. “Authority gone to one’s head,” Einstein said, “is the greatest enemy of truth.”

Posted in genius, Einstein | 6 Comments »

11. September 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

According to Jurgen Neffe (Einstein, pp. 36-7), various behaviors that Einstein exhibited as a child, specifically delayed speech, fits of temper, an ability to detach and focus on an interest in a way that rendered him inaccessible to those around him, and problems with social interactions have led some to scientists to conclude that Einstein had Asperger’s syndrome.
Thomas Sowell of Stanford established a special designation for children of high intelligence who are slow to speak and withdraw from others. His name for the condition? Einstein Syndrome.

Posted in genius, Einstein | 3 Comments »