Words of Wisdom

 

I just finished reading The Real Work; on the mystery of mastery by Adam Gopnik.

It was not a quick read, in spite of being a fairly slim volume.  Some books look deceivingly 'simple' or 'small' but contain gems.

Such was the case with this one.

Gopnik talks a lot about 'mastery' and examines the role of knowledge, of learning, of teaching.  He uses stories to illustrate the examples he has plucked from his own experience, and I love a good story!

But there is much to think about, consider, especially as someone who has, for most of her life, taught - in one way or another.

I even have a certificate that says I have 'mastered' weaving.  But I still learn something, almost every day.  And examining the process of learning, of *mastering* something over the course of a lifetime has been both illuminating and affirming.  One of the things I have learned is that there no end point in the journey of 'mastering' something.  There is always something more, something different, to learn.  (Change one thing, everything can change.)

If you, too, are interested in learning and teaching, you may find this book of interest.

I would like to quote the entire book (or nearly) but instead I will encourage people to go find it.  I 'found' it while looking for something else entirely, and kind of wish I had found it 40 years ago.  But it wasn't written.  Yet.  And it's never too late to stop and think and consider such things.

He frames mastery not just as something that we consciously study, but also how we live our lives.  On page 7 he talks about watching his mother in the kitchen:

"She rolled strudel, and then later traced for me the rudiments of Godel's Proof on a beach, and then taught me step by step how to make a beef Stroganoff, my favourite dish at twelve - steps (onions, peppers, beef, sauce, sour cream) that I not only know by heart and execute today but that were, perhaps my first conscious induction into the deeper truth, which the stories in this book recapitulate: that mastery happens small step by small step and that the mystery, more often than not, is that of a kind of life-enhancing equivalent of the illusion called "persistence of motion" when we watch a movie or cartoon.  "Flow" is the shorthand term that's been popularized for the feeling of the real work as it seeps through our neurons and veins, and, though we may know the flow of some things we do so well by middle age that we scarcely feel them flowing, having to set out on a new current makes us feel the resistance that is essential to the motion. "Flow" we learn again, always begins as fragments.  The separate steps become a sequence, and the sequence then looks like magic, or just like life, or just like Stroganoff."

On page 129 he talks about being good, or not good:

"But the last runner need compete only with herself.  Her heartbeats are well expended even in the loss.  I take as much pleasure from playing "Lullaby of Birdland" badly as George Shearing did in writing it well.  Use Your Hearbeats! cries the Internet meme, and as poet Mary Oliver wrote, we can at least choose how to spend them, decide what is it you plan to do with your own wild and precious life."

We focus, as a society, on being 'perfect' and yet on page 158 he observes:

"We need evident imperfection in order to be perfectly impressed.  All the expressive dimensions whose force in music Levitin had measured and made mechanical were defections from precision.  Vibrato is a way of not quite landing directly on the note; rubato is not quite keeping perfectly to the beat.  Expressiveness is error.  What really moves us in music is the vital sign of a human hand, in all its unsteady and broken grace.  Ella singing Gershwin matters because Ella knows when to make the words warble, and Ellis Larkins knows when to make the keyboard sigh.  The art is the perfected imperfection."

And the last bit I will quote here is on page 233:

"The manufacture of this illusion, short steps into seamless sequence, is not a special feature of the movies; it is a fact of life, the truth of learning.  All the steps seemed to meld together into a single, just syncopated seamless whole - outlines only very slightly blurred, the tracks almost overlapped, with a very small echo audible.  Driving and dancing, the acquisition of "the hand" and the movement of the feet; the jab of boxing and the time-tilt of drawing, form a permanent human rhythm, heart-bound, of small actions building bigger blocks."

These are just a few of the passages that caused me to stop reading in order to savour the words, the thoughts, the concepts.  And of course these observations are hung on the author's stories of learning new things - baking, boxing, driving a car, dancing, just as examples.

But each of those activities were akin to learning how to weave (or do any other skilled task).

For years I have asserted that for me weaving is a working meditation.  With each story Gopnik told about learning something new, I could feel the reverberation of a shared experience, in my case related to weaving (and all the other things I had to learn along the way - from writing, to using the internet, to figuring out how to remotely prepare to teach workshops, how to get there - and back again - quite literally turning into a travel agent - and publishing, then marketing my books.)

There is much to think about in this book, if one is inclined to think about such things.