People who have experienced fear might be labeled cowardly, or simply shy, by their peers and by themselves. If we accept this label and reinforce it, reify it, we convince ourselves more and more that the label defines us. Then we really are trapped by it, boxed in by language. Instead we can work to understand that we do not exist as static entities who always respond the same way to similar scenarios. We are dynamic, ever changing, and we have the choice in any given moment to be who we think we should be.
What can we learn from improvising? There is no “takeaway” that we can carry with us. There are, rather, some things we can leave behind, including the fixed idea of self as a sack with certain contents. Qualities of interaction are not things we possess; they are activities that we manifest in a particular place and time. We can see people without captions; we can allow music to unfold without attaching labels to it. We can allow our own stories to play out in the complexity of real life.
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I am not a writer — I am writing. Yesterday I was not writing. I was doing dreary errands and engaging in distraction, entertainment, and memories. It is natural to write sometimes and not to write at others. Rimbaud wrote, and then he didn’t write. But if I stick with nouns — “I am a writer” — then a frustrating day like yesterday would have to be framed as “writer’s block” — a disease for which I seek a cure. By treating activities or states as though they were solid objects, we buy a world of trouble. We automatically say, “I have a disease,” “I have a condition.” This metaphor works marvelously well in the case of infectious diseases, where a disease vector like a bacterium, virus, or toxin has indeed invaded our bodies. But too frequently it is extended to contexts in which the metaphor does not apply. Pharmaceutical industries and many other industries, of course, love this metaphor of having. We are so easily sucked into conceiving complex relationships and systems in the framework of problem-and-solution.
We are trained to say, I am this, I am that. We may spend much of our day playing music, driving a delivery truck, treating patients in a hospital, forecasting the weather, investigating crimes, but to be pinned down and solidified by a professional identity leaves out the immense variety of every human life. We can make the jump into thinking systemically, to realizing that we are verbs, not things.
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David Chadwick, one of the priests at San Francisco Zen Center, asked Shunryū Suzuki, the master who founded the center, if he could summarize Buddhism in one sentence. This was a cocky, tongue-in-cheek question because Suzuki-roshi had many times urged his students not to make a thing out of Buddhism. So David expected that Suzuki would refuse to answer his question. But Suzuki did answer. He said, “Everything changes.”
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I remember driving in the mountains above Los Angeles with my son Greg when he was one and a half. He was at the stage when language was flooding in, ceaselessly making connections. We had a long view of the winding road heading up the hillsides and open chaparral. Every time a driver passed us on the road, Greg, sitting behind me, strapped into his car seat, pointed and shouted, “Car! Car! Car!” Then to my alarm he began to wiggle out of his restraints like Houdini, the better to stand up in the back seat and shout, “Car! Car! Car!” with a musical, rising tone, speaking with his whole body, from the feet up. Babies are like this. Beyond the obvious usefulness of language, there is the joy of naming, the power of crying out, the excitement that seems to jump from the pointing finger, the dance of light between eye and object.
That beautiful act of naming is what eventually undoes — for many of us — the freshness of our baby perceptions. We learn the labels: that’s a Ford, that’s Malibu Canyon, that’s a chair, that’s a symphony, that’s money. That’s a person of a certain ethnic group or religion. Having the power to name and categorize, we forget the fascination of those individual experiences, and the newness of each perception, the newness of each face that confronts us. We stop looking deeply at what is in front of us. We adopt the jaded, all-knowing view of the professional and dismiss what is in front of us because we already know what it is — I’ve seen it all, I know it all. Often we see people’s creative urges stopped in their tracks by gatekeepers so sure of what they know that there is no room for what they don’t. Every profession — musician, publisher, professor, police detective, physician, builder — has built up expertise, necessary for functioning in the world. Yet every form of expertise produces a counter-condition in which we become limited by the filters. We know what’s right; we know what works; we know. And therefore we sometimes cannot see what is right in front of our noses.
Keeping that balance between expertise and freshness is the practice of a lifetime. Each of us can be the baby fascinated by the new things in the world, ready to receive. If you have learned to play the violin very well, your technique can become a jail. But if you retain your childhood capacity to use the instrument as a toy, and couple that with your expertise, your technique can become anything you want it to. The baby who shouted, “Car!” was not the same baby the next day, and the day after that. The baby is a continuous transformation of moment-to-moment action: growth, evolution, change, destruction, renewal. We passed a stream of shiny cars in the canyon one minute, and moments later passed a junk heap of rusted relics.
And so the famous words of Suzuki-roshi: “If your mind is empty, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”
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One evening, over a Mexican dinner in Santa Cruz, California, Gregory Bateson told me for the first time of Anatol Holt’s idea for a bumper sticker that said stamp out nouns. I was twenty-two and he was sixty-nine. We spoke of how difficult it is to change our way of thinking, to see the world as context and process rather than a set of fixed entities. By way of conclusion, he said, “You know, there is no substance,” grinning with the irony of saying this while he, an enormous shaggy old Englishman at six foot five, was looming over me with a beer in his hand. A lot of substance, yet teaching me that substance was only the current appearance of an impermanent, ever-changing, interactive life. Stamping out nouns is not a call for an exotic restructuring of language; it is an invitation to see and speak about the world as active process. We can use the terms and procedures of daily life without getting stuck in them. Then we can use language with pleasure and integrity. The reduction of anything, including activities we most love, into commodities and objects, the tendency for the lava of life to be frozen into stone by language and thought, means that we need to stamp out nouns as a continuous practice. To be a verb is a full-time occupation, like breathing.
Maury Maverick’s grandfather was Samuel Maverick, after whom the word maverick was coined. Samuel Maverick, unlike other Texas cattlemen, did not brand his cattle. Thus, a maverick was an unbranded cow or steer. The unbranded, the unlabeled, is a significant concept for us today, when business interests are relentlessly trying to impose branding on us. Branding actually refers to the cruel procedure of using a hot iron to burn a logo into the skin of an animal — or in the days of slavery, a human being. Our right as free human beings is not to be branded. That is where improvisation in life and art meets our daily experience. Improvising means freedom from branding. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, not having thoughts planted in us by entities not of our choosing. Part of an improviser’s work is negative: stomping on nouns, stomping on dreams of polished perfection, stomping on preconceptions of how things are supposed to be. To what extent can that stomping be a dance, with its own shape, its own wild grace, its own life-giving awareness of what and who is around us? Stamp, stomp, squish. It is great exercise for the legs, the whole body, and puts a spring in your step. With twenty-six bones in each foot, twenty muscles, and more than eighty tendons and ligaments, the combinations and permutations, the fresh, invigorating styles of stomping, are nearly infinite.
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JULIET: You kiss by the book.