went to the hospital for an echocardiogram. I told the technician administering it that I wanted a copy of the video files. If there was nothing wrong with my heart, then I at least wanted to be able to edit the video and make a visual music piece from it. She said, “I’m an artist too.” I asked her what her art form was. I thought she was going to say that in addition to her medical job she was a painter or songwriter. Instead she patted the machine and said, “This.”
Giving an echocardiogram is one of those innumerable tasks that on the surface seem objective and by the book, but in fact there is an enormous range of personal style in how the images are taken. With dozens of knobs and switches on the machine controlling contrast and many other variables in the resulting images, with variations in the placement and pressure of the sonogram sensor on the patient’s body, how it is handled and moved, the possibilities for individual style are enormous, all in the attempt to produce an “objectively” clear picture of how the heart valves are functioning. She said that when she comes into the lab each morning and sees studies done by other technicians, she can instantly identify who did each study. Each has his or her own style. When she was training to do this work, her instructor called these variations knobology.
Such acts are not typically recognized as art, but a fundamentally artistic process is involved in tweaking knobs on a machine or tuning the performance of an engine. These adjustments are not so different from tuning words and phrases in a paragraph, mixing pigments, or playing with gradations of speed, pressure, and point of contact on a violin bow. Knobology is also a term of art on aircraft carriers and submarines.
Back in the days of the telegraph — a simple digital code of dots, dashes, and pauses — a telegraph operator receiving a message could tell who was on the other end of the line, perhaps hundreds of miles away, by his or her “fist.” The rhythm of those digital bleeps and pauses, small variations in tempo, revealed an individual style that was unmistakable to the experienced listener. As recently as World War II, the fist of a telegraph operator enabled us to tell the difference between real messages and those sent by enemy spies. The people who received these messages could identify who was sending it by idiosyncrasies in timing. If sensitive information like “I’m in Northern France” were coded right into the message, it could be intercepted and decoded. Instead, those receiving the communication could rely on the unique telegraphic fingerprint of the agent on the other end.
The echocardiogram technician said that in an earlier part of her life she had been an accountant. Accounting is yet another field that is supposedly objective and straightforward. Yet the choices one makes in setting up and structuring a chart of accounts are not easy to define: how to categorize this or that expense; how to balance often inchoate competing interests such as profitability, viability, legality, and ethics; how to use numbers to represent truth or to obscure it. Even jobs that are nominally uncreative require constant personal interpretation and invention.
Double-entry accounting was invented by one of those Italian Renaissance polymaths, the monk Luca Pacioli. He was also responsible for much of the theory behind perspective painting. Pacioli’s book The Divine Proportion was illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci. Accounting and perspective painting are both arts that revolve around representing a complex, multidimensional reality on a flat piece of paper. In accounting we draw a dividing line down the middle of the page, setting up a zero point so that the debits and credits reflect against each other. To this day every bank statement, every corporation’s accounting, works by Pacioli’s system. Similarly, perspective painting runs an imaginary line down the canvas; we orient ourselves in three-dimensional space by the frame of reference created by that line. Our brain plays with the details and contrasts, balancing the sides so that exceptional items really stick out. We draw that line and then use it to accentuate the interplay of figure and ground. This is the virtuosity of the woman in the cardiac imaging lab. She understands the mathematics and the technology inherent in the ultrasound instrument as elements of her art. She is able to do it simultaneously as a creative form and as a technological task whose results may have life-or-death consequences. The technology depends on her subjectivity, on her interpretation, on her practicing it as an art.
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I once heard the Zen master Dainin Katagiri speak of the importance of not being too sticky. I never knew if Katagiri was deliberately playing with language to give us a fresh perspective, or if it was just the way his Japanese-flavored English came out. Either way, this was a fruitful poetic inversion of our usual idea of being stuck. Moment by moment, each of us is attracted to certain things and repelled by others; we have fears and hopes, we entertain our ideas and the ideas prevalent in our society — and we find ourselves clinging to those ideas, following our attractions and repulsions. Concepts and passions can trap us like flypaper, or rather we ourselves are the flypaper. It is easy to see ourselves as stuck in a rut at work, stuck in a way of relating to friends or loved ones. Stuck in an addiction. Stuck in an artistic habit, writer’s block, speaker’s block, blocked friendship, a block in the stiff muscles of one’s back. A darting mind, or a mind sticking to repetitive thoughts, blocks us from sleeping or from acting. We speak of other people as stuck in prejudice, stuck in the past.
A musician I know said, “I was so stuck in my improvisations, rattling on and on in the same way, I could hardly play sometimes, I was getting so bored with it.” We have practiced a craft for years — this is the way to do it. We may want to try it another way, but we are stuck in this. We have dug a groove with all our sincere practice.
Then we feel like victims of circumstance; we are in a situation. But invert the relationship implied in the word, and we see ourselves as actively sticking rather than stuck. Stuck is a passive construction, not only of language but of a person’s entire reality. Sticky reveals that it is we who are doing the sticking, we who choose, whether consciously or unconsciously, to cling to the objects of our attractions and repulsions. Therefore we have the power to dissolve some of this glue.
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There is an old story about two monks crossing a river. They meet a beautiful young woman who wants to get across but is afraid of the rushing water. One of the monks picks her up and carries her. When they reach the far shore, he puts her down, and she goes her separate way. A bit farther along the muddy road, his companion berates him for violating his monkish vows by holding a girl in his arms. The first monk replies, “I put her down at the riverbank. Are you still carrying her?”
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Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, tells of being stuck by the roadside in the wilderness, his vehicle disabled because of a screw that has rusted in place. The screw was no longer a small, cheap, generic object like hundreds of others in the machine. This particular screw was an individual phenomenon that was worth exactly everything. The whole trip narrowed down to the problem of getting that screw out. As he investigated the machine, Pirsig realized he needed to face the mental stuckness that so often accompanies the physical. “Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.” To abide in and be able to tolerate such stuckness is one of the fruits of mindfulness practice.
A century earlier, Sigmund Freud arrived at his own method of mindfulness. In 1912 he wrote a paper of practical instructions for therapists. How does a doctor do psychoanalysis without getting caught up in his or her own predispositions? If the job is attending empathetically to the pain of many people, how does one attend to each patient without getting one’s own emotions stuck in their problems? And above all, how does one understand another human being without jumping to premature conclusions? Freud wrote, “One has simply to listen.” He goes on to say,
The technique is a very simple one. It disclaims the use of any special aids, even of note-taking, and simply consists in making no effort to concentrate the attention on anything in particular, and in maintaining in regard to all that one hears the same measure of calm, quiet attentiveness — of “evenly-hovering attention.” For as soon as attention is deliberately concentrated, one begins