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 »

18. August 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

I have just uncovered that greatest of all delights, a book that runs so close to my vein that I look forward to going to bed at night so I can dip into it.  The book is The Paper Garden:  An Artist {Begins Her Life’s Work} At 72 by Molly Peacock. Perhaps it was my recent birthday that drew me to the book–one of the dreadful decade birthdays where it’s impossible not to glance back at goals unreached.  Anyway, the book turned up on my Amazon recommendations and given the title, I ran to the library.

The Paper Garden defies category, for while it presents a biographical portrait of the 18th century paper-cut artist Mary Granville Pendarves Delany (1700-1788), it also contains memoir-like passages of the author’s journey of discovery and her reasons for attraction to the amazing flower collages which are reproduced (gorgeously, I might add) in the 2010 Bloomsbury Press publication.  Inspiration abounds to pursue whatever artistic passion consumes one, age notwithstanding, but what I find most riveting are poet Molly Peacock’s observations on making art.  (My novel, Shadow Dancing, (http://www.nancypinard.com/2.html) explored that subject, so it is dear and close, a subject I’ve tried to break down for my creative writing students into the bite-size pieces required when one embarks on eating any elephant.)

Listen to what Peacock says after noting how Mary Granville left unerased pencil marks on her cut-outs, as if unaware that anyone would ever view her work, let alone inspect her craft:

“Great technique means that you have to abandon perfectionism.  Perfectionism either stops you cold or slows you down too much.  Yet paradoxically, it’s proficiency that allows a person to make any art at all; you must have technical skill to accomplish anything, but you also must have passions, which, in an odd way, is technique forgotten.  The joy of technique is the bulging bag of tricks it gives you to solve your dilemmas.  Craft gives you the tools for reparation.  And teachers give you craft, for a good teacher urges you beyond your childish perfectionism.  From there you proceed into the practice that eventually becomes expertise.”   (Peacock, p. 28-29)

I’m thinking about this in terms of my own work–Isn’t the “childish perfectionism” what often causes me to be blocked?– the need for risk-taking in early drafts, before the slow, eventual process of plying and applying craft to remedy the problems.  I’m also thinking about Albert Einstein’s process and the question of the contribution made by Mileva Maric.

When I look at what the biographers report about how each of them managed their studies–Einstein able to dismiss the demands of academia and digest the newest thought (not being taught) at the Polytech in Zurich.  Maric, by contrast, was much more the disciplined partaker of academic demands–what normally is associated with being an A student.  She never missed class, did her reading and homework, took notes, attended labs, followed directions.  While Einstein got into trouble for “coloring outside the lines,” inventing his own protocol for lab experiments such that in Introductory Physics Lab he was flunked by Herr Professor Pernet, he was also teaching himself what worked and what didn’t.  He had disdain for repeating experiments and collecting data that had already been collected by someone else, saying “Nothing new comes of thinking about a problem the same way it was created.” In fact, he encouraged Maric to use data collected by others–a fact which annoyed Herr Professor Weber, as if Einstein was somehow advocating cheating.

Their particular, individual orientations toward problem-solving would seem to support the thesis that Einstein was in fact the person responsible for the theoretical leaps required to change the world’s thought.  Their son, Hans Albert, reported that his mother stayed up late at night, checking Albert’s work, re-working the math.  Where she scored a 9 to Albert’s 10 in theoretical physics, one might also imagine her usefulness as a sounding board for new ideas–that person who can see the notion, but possibly also the cracks.   Should she get credit for that?  Doesn’t it take both minds?

It would seem so , since the locus of Albert’s work was accomplished during their marriage.  Input from Michelle Besso, Marcel Grossman, and others continued after the marriage ended, but the revolutionary thought did not.

What conclusion do you draw?

Posted in The Paper Garden, Shadow Dancing, making art, Molly Peacock, reading, Einstein, Darwin, Mileva Maric, writing | 3 Comments »