September 30, 2007
close one
I left my copy at the coffeeshop, but today’s New York Times included an item about a new rock-and-roll amusement park with a roller coaster called “Led Zeppelin: The Ride” . . . which was apparently named by “Jimmy Page himself.” Implying that there was some sort of decision-making process involved. Meaning we narrowly dodged “The Firm: The Ride.”
September 26, 2007
cleanup on aisle one
I’m starting to remember why I don’t blog. If I hadn’t posted that last entry for God and everybody else to see, I wouldn’t now have to confront Marc’s irritatingly well-written rebuttal. But I did, and I do, so I will now attempt to trim some of my less-well-considered comments with the cold steel of the Majcher reason-razor.
I was of course wrong that you can’t prove a negative. But at the risk of pissing off the propellerheads even further, God is a special case. We can say that there’s not a dragon in my hand because we have access to the entire area encompassed by my hand. But saying that God doesn’t exist anywhere requires complete simultaneous awareness of everywhere, and if you had that . . . you’d be God, disproving your own theory.
I should have been much more specific about the reference to Occam’s Razor. I agree completely that anyone who thinks that gravity is proof of the existence of God just because science hasn’t figured it out yet is grasping at straws. (I further agree that attempting to “prove” theological assumptions using scientific principles is both bad science and bad theology.)
No, what I was referring to is those situations in which (a) there’s no good scientific explanation and (b) there’s a fairly straightforward and coherent explanation that happens to depend on the existence of God. But because these situations are typically experienced internally rather than externally, they’re completely subject to the interpretation of the person experiencing them.
I know a guy who, though not a scientist, is as hard-headed a superrationalist as anybody. He told me about a seance he was a part of in which the group decided to try to invoke a specific person, and since they were in a cabin in the Hill Country, they hit on a Scotch-Irish farmer from the 1800s. My friend told me how the table that everyone had their hands on tumped over on its side and rolled across the room, all hands clearly visible the entire time. He saw this and remains convinced that nobody in the group was making it happen.
“Wow, so you actually called up a ghost,” I said.
“NO!” he shouted. THERE WAS NO GHOST! We accessed some kind of paranormal energy, but THERE WAS NO GHOST!”
So he was willing to acknowledge that during a seance a table had rolled itself across the room unaided, because he saw it with his own eyes. But when it was suggested that in ironically attempting to contact a spirit, he’d actually contacted a spirit, he denied it completely. Because he didn’t have “proof,” and because he doesn’t believe in ghosts.
I mean, come on.
What chaps me about scientific fundamentalists is not that they dispute the existence of God. It’s that they’re so bloody smug about it, as though they’re tossing their judgments down from some uninvolved height of objectivity. Occasionally, as in the case of my ghost-dissing friend, the practical limits of “objectivity” become clear. But for the most part science snobs act like they’re moving through life completely uncorrupted by illogical thinking. Please.
I’m in the middle of rereading William James’ The Will to Believe, but if I remember it rightly his argument is that wanting to know the truth and not wanting to be wrong are two different things, and that it’s possible that you sometimes have to risk being wrong in order to get to the truth. In other words, you might have to make a leap of faith. This seems to line up (again, if I remember rightly) with Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argues that scientific advances, far from being built on what came before, are actually paradigm shifts that require a radical break with existing orthodoxy.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the reason science and spirituality get crosswise with each other is that they’re coming from completely different places. Science is based on verifiable observation and reproducible results. Spirituality springs from an internal experience that is neither verifiable nor reproducible.
Need I point out that you ignore either of these viewpoints at your peril? Everyone reading this probably agrees that flying in the face of empirical scientific evidence is a bad idea, but the science jihadists don’t get that if you’re only going to accept scientifically valid information, you’re going to have to ignore about 99 percent of your own experience . . . including those intuitive leaps that move science forward. Ultimately, your own experience is all you have. Why you wanna put Baby in the corner like that?
The trouble starts when either one goes wandering off from its home turf. Spirituality hardens into organized religion, and suddenly internal experience is less important than defending the faith. The scientific method hardens into scientific orthodoxy, and suddenly openmindedness is less important than . . . defending the faith. In both cases, humble inquiry metastasizes into rigid belief.
Which is, I suppose, what we do as human beings. My current theory is that most of the trouble in the world comes from people thinking that their personal experience is the benchmark for humanity. I don’t see that problem going away anytime soon, no matter who’s winning the culture wars.
September 22, 2007
double negative
I stand by my assertion that atheism and belief in God are both acts of faith and have much more to do with the internal landscape of the person in question than with any external reality. However, I think I’ve been selling atheism short with my misunderstanding of the scientific method.
My reasoning was that since you can’t prove a negative, atheism is a less tenable position than belief. That is, I might conceivably prove once and for all that God exists. I can never prove definitively that God doesn’t exist; all I can offer is an absence of proof.
But any scientific hypothesis has to be disprovable, meaning that the tables get turned. If I believe in God, the only way you can disprove me is by proving that God doesn’t exist, which is impossible. But if I don’t believe in God, you can theoretically disprove me by providing evidence of God. Ergo, disbelief is theoretically more open to scientific refutal than belief.
Of course, my experience is that atheists will defy common sense and Occam’s Razor a million and one times in their desperate attempt to find some explanation other than God for any number of phenomena, but I admit my methodological mistake.
September 20, 2007
as if
I’ve claimed to be an agnostic for a long time. It was, I think, a step up from the scientifically indefensible position of atheism, but it took me a long time to really understand the implications of not knowing. (”It’s not fear of the unknown,” said Viola Spolin, in a different context. “It’s fear of not knowing.”) I understood and claimed the meaning of “agnostic” without actually practicing it. If asked, I would have said that I didn’t know whether there was a God or not, but what I meant was this: “There may or may not be a God . . . but if there is, I know exactly what kind of God it is and what it’s capable of.” I had apparently interpreted not knowing as narrowly applying to one fact and one fact only — the existence of God, or lack thereof — but after that, regardless of how it shook out, I had everything else covered.
Almost five years ago I was forced to face my own hypocrisy, and while my basic theology didn’t change, my attitude toward everyone else’s did. There was a time when hearing someone talk about how God had found her a parking place would drive me up a wall. “No he fucking didn’t,” I’d mutter darkly, “and why are we assuming it’s a he?”
Of course, if I’m really an agnostic, I have to admit that I have no idea whether God finds people parking places, or whether he has a penis, or whether anything else about him — or her, or it — is true. All I can really say is whether that particular God story matches up with my experience, and my experience of the universe from a God’s-eye view is pretty limited.
The fact is that I can’t or don’t want to believe in a God concerned with the convenience of certain individuals. As my friend Bill Spencer says, “It always makes me nervous when people say that God found them a parking place . . . ’cause he’s ignoring Africa.” But that’s just Bill’s (and my) view of how things should be, which has little or no bearing on how things actually are.
If you think about it, arguments over the existence of God are absurd in the extreme. Why would our opinion have any bearing on the reality of the situation? If there’s a God, it’s not going to be destroyed by nonbelievers; if there’s not, it’s not going to be brought into existence by the faithful. (Well, actually, it might, but that’s a whole different post.) The point is that we’re so full of ourselves that we act like our belief is a favor to be bestowed on deserving entities. As though God and evolution and O.J.’s innocence and supply-side economics are all lined up in the hallway nervously awaiting our ruling on their credibility.
I didn’t get very far into Karen Armstrong’s book about the origins of the great religious traditions, but before I bailed I picked up the nugget that most of the founders were far less concerned with what you believed than with what you did. Doubt all you want, but by god have that fatted calf ready for the spit by Thursday, or there’ll be hell to pay. Literally.
Since then, we’ve discovered our inner lives, and learned to negotiate the gap between appearance and experience, and hooray for us, but I can’t help but wonder if that primitive approach doesn’t make more sense.
Belief may matter to god, or to the universe, and it may even bring larger things into existence — I don’t know — but if anything at all matters, what we do matters, and because we desperately want to think of ourselves as continuous, coherent, consistent entities, we generally try to make our actions match up with our beliefs. We fudge and deny and cut corners, but most of us never give up the attempt entirely. (Hence the elaborate moral codes of both criminal and military subcultures, which conveniently justify all kinds of violence in the service of larger principles.)
To an agnostic like me, this brings up an interesting possibility, which is that acting as if something is true might have exactly the same effect as believing it. What’s the difference between believing that might makes right and acting like might makes right? To the observer, none at all. And the gap between the two narrows in a way we don’t like to acknowledge: what you do has a lot more effect on what you believe than the other way around.
I am currently being asked to consider a theological possibility that I’ve always found incomprehensible: that there’s a God who actually cares about what happens to me. If I’m going to be true to my own agnosticism, I can’t reject the idea out of hand . . . but every fiber in me resists it. I can’t fathom it.
Of course, if there were a God, one of its defining characteristics would be its unfathomability, which sort of stops that argument dead in its tracks. So I’m forced to consider another source of resistance that’s both cosmically smaller and personally larger; namely, that I can’t accept the possibilty of a God who loves me unconditionally because I can’t accept the possibility of being unconditionally loved.
It’s not that all the theological arguments are wrong, or that I don’t believe them. It’s that over and over again, I find that I’ve lined all my arguments up in the service of a completely irrational idea, just like the moral code that says that if you’re wearing the wrong colors I get to kill you with impunity. Just because my arguments make logical sense doesn’t mean that logic is what put them there. (Leaving aside the fact that logic is wildly overrated in a culture so in thrall to science and the law.)
So for a while I’m going to be conducting a thought experiment. It might change my behavior for the better, but even if it doesn’t, it rattles me to do it and it undermines some of my deepest unproved assumptions, so its worth is already evident.
The experiment is this: throughout the day, but particularly when I’m stuck or undecided about what to do, I ask myself a question: What if there’s a God who loves me?
I can’t begin to tell you how hard it is for me to type that question without cringing. This should be interesting.
. . . and you are . . . ?
If you see me out in public and wave at me in passing, or even say hi, and you get your feelings hurt because you got the generic “Hey, how’s it goin’?” instead of the personalized, enthusiastic greeting to which you feel entitled, take a look in the mirror when you get back home. If, when you do so, you notice that you’re wearing giant sunglasses that obscure most of your face, there’s a real good chance that I didn’t recognize you, unless you were Tami Nelson.
I haven’t worn sunglasses for years, partly because it’s a pain in the ass to carry two pairs of glasses around and partly because I feel their alleged function (allowing me to see in bright light) is just cover for their actual function (a socially acceptable means of distancing myself from other people by depriving them of personal information, like where I’m looking). I carry a pair in my car, but over the past ten years there have been maybe three or four instances where I felt like I was operating in conditions so blinding that I needed them to function.
And really, aren’t they pretty much played out as a fashion accoutrement? At least we seem to be past that period beginning in the ’80s when they were nakedly used to invoke coolness, and more particularly blackness. I just don’t understand why a quarter century of that nonsense hasn’t dimmed their appeal. Jack Nicholson? Corey Hart? The California Raisins? The uncool/unappreciated/undeflowered kid whose spike in stature is signified in the last third of a shitty movie is represented by his peering over a pair of Ray-Bans while “I Feel Good” or “Bad to the Bone” messes itself on the soundtrack? Who, at this point, would think that sunglasses are inherently cool?
(Grandfathered exceptions: Ian Hunter, Graham Parker, Steve Doerr of the LeRoi Brothers.)
September 14, 2007
a reader wonders
For those of you who don’t check the comments section, I draw your attention to this plaintive cri de coeur from one “Roy”:
I feel down on my improv a lot, and I know it hurts the show. But how in the hell do I shake that?
I wouldn’t presume to give “Roy” advice on improv, because for all I know he’s a seasoned performer whose troupe has 98 shows under its collective belt, and if that’s the case it would be pretty silly for me to be telling him what’s what.
But I have experience in other areas that might prove relevant, and I share it now.
Here’s a powerful idea that has served me well for almost five years. It’s easy to remember, and there are very few situations in which it’s not useful. Ready? It goes like this:
I don’t know.
Why do we get down on ourselves about our improv? Because we make mistakes, or don’t play the way we’d intended to, or don’t honor principles we think are important, or just have a bad show. Fair enough.
Except that all of these problems are based on two assumptions:
- I know what should have happened.
- It was within my power to make that happen.
To which I reply:
- No you fucking don’t.
- Okay, maybe, but if number 1 is wrong then number 2 is quite possibly less important than you thought it was.
I really believe this: I’m not qualified to say what’s a mistake and what’s not.
I’m not just talking about improv. I’m talking about realizing that over the course of my entire life, things that at the time seemed like horrible missteps turned out to be crucial turning points or delayed-fuse epiphanies or raw material for later mind-blowing wonderfulness.
A lot of it, of course, is that I choose to view them that way. But I’m the decider, yes? And what is improv but an endless series of decisions that what just happened was the best thing that possibly could have happened?
Good improvisers say yes. Everybody knows this. And recently I’ve had a series of teachers who drilled it into me mercilessly: Say yes to everything. Even the offers you don’t like. Especially the offers you don’t like.
Because I’m a good student, and want to do well at this, and welcome the opportunity to be a positive force in the world, I say “Yes! To everything!”
And in a dark recess of my brain, back in that fucked-up part that wants me dead, the part I visit less and less often these days but which will always be there, a cracked and horrid voice adds the lethal qualifier:
“Yes! To everything! . . . except me.”
There it is. We spend weeks and months of our lives learning how to honor and celebrate our teammates’ contributions, but we can’t be bothered to extend the same courtesy to ourselves. What did we ever do to us to be treated like this?
For me, the essential fact about improv is that I don’t know. I’m a writer; if I knew, I’d just go home and write it. But I don’t know. I need other people and the terror of a mind suddenly as blank as an empty page just before the moment spills into it and makes itself known. The moment knows. I don’t know.
And if I don’t know, if I really honor that and believe it, I will have to admit that I don’t know even after it’s already happened. Whatever happened happened, and my job is to say yes to whatever happened . . . even if that puts me in the position of saying yes to someone who’s saying no. Even if that someone is (shamefully, horribly) me.
Let’s address the issue that has been distracting you for the last ten paragraphs or so. “Of course there are mistakes, Ratliff,” you say, huffily adjusting your monocle. “If someone is named Sharmila in a scene and later I call her Svetlana, that’s a mistake. Period.”
Okay. But this is where number 2 above comes in. You’re assuming you had the power to do otherwise.
I don’t want to get into a long debate about free will and the power of the unconscious. My point is that if we’re plying an art that is based almost entirely on the accidental, the ephemeral, and the existential, it seems a little arrogant to claim that we’re in control up there. Are you sure you could have avoided that mistake? How could you possibly know that?
We can be rigorous and dedicated in our practice, and we can try our best to create circumstances in which we play well. But once the show starts, we have to swim in the soup that surrounds us. At that point, it becomes irrelevant how much or how little we’ve prepared. Here we are now.
I would prefer to be completely open and relaxed and alert and supportive and brilliant and present every time I play. But that doesn’t always happen. So sometimes I find myself onstage feeling leaden and negative and weak and wasted.
That sucks. But I have a surefire way to make it even worse: I start beating myself up about it.
If I were in better shape, I wouldn’t feel tired and I could make my body do what I wanted. If I would just meditate regularly, I’d be able to concentrate on what people are saying. Why didn’t I set goals for myself before I came onstage? Hello, tailspin. Goodbye, improv.
Or I can take a moment and say this to myself: “Okay, I just screwed up her name. That means I’m not very present tonight, and furthermore my knees are killing me, and I’m pretty sure that’s my ex on the couch with her new boyfriend. I wish it were otherwise, but I need to acknowledge these things and work with them, because that’s apparently the reality right now. If I accept that and recommit, I can still contribute something to the show and not bring everyone down with me. (Emphasis added.)
Here’s what improv teachers (and Zen masters) say: “Be in the moment.”
Here’s what they don’t say: “Be in the moment that you think you’d be having if you were at the top of your game, which you’re not because you failed to adequately prepare yourself because you suck.”
If you’re really committed to this moment, you’re committed to everything in this moment, INCLUDING YOUR OWN GLORIOUSLY FUCKED-UP COSMICALLY INFINITE CRIPPLINGLY LIMITED PERFECT SELF. What if you you drop dead right after the curtain call? What if this is the last chance you’ll ever get to do this? This is it. No do-overs.
What is it we do? We take two or three fragments of this moment and rub them together until they ignite. The more fragments we figure out how to add to the fire without choking it, the more compelling our creation. If we dismiss or ignore something, it doesn’t get used, and at the end of the night it’s just sitting there scorched and discarded at the side of the stage, damning evidence of the limits of our love.
September 13, 2007
hit where i live
“What happened to the blog?”
Well, what happened to the blog is that what had become its main purpose, conveying the experience of the iO summer intensive, evaporated once I got home.
But I am also much more leery about commenting on improv and improvisers here than I was in Chicago. As anyone who knows me knows, I have a big mouth, and late-night blog entries have a way of evading whatever sensible filters I have in place.
That said, it’s not like I stopped learning improv when I came back — on the contrary, I feel like I’m just starting — so maybe I can remember that I have another, private journal on my computer that nobody else will ever see, and then exercise some discrimination about what entries go where.
The week after I got back I played Stool Pigeon for the second time ever. It was great fun, and there was general agreement that it was a good show. My personal watershed went unnoticed by everyone else, because it was something that happens in improv all the time. It just hadn’t happened to me yet.
Namely, I walked onstage at the same time as Bob, and when I saw what he was doing, I dropped my initiation. (That’s not the part I hadn’t done before. )
When I saw that he had beat me to the initiation, I did what I have been trained to do: I held on to my physicality and settled in for the scene, waiting to see where, if anywhere, I might be of use.
Here’s what happened to me for the first time: midway through the scene, I realized exactly what I should be doing and did it. It was something I didn’t know when I walked onstage, but because I didn’t (visibly) bail on the scene, even when I didn’t know what I was doing there, my sudden realization may very well have looked to the audience like something Bob and I had planned the whole time. (I’m pretty sure we entered from opposite sides of the stage, further upping the ESP factor.)
This sounds so dumb and elementary when written out, and I’m sure I’ve discussed this process with dozens of people in the past year and a half. But I hadn’t yet experienced it, and being rewarded for remaining present and paying attention was a huge payoff.
Okay, here’s a perfect example of why I have to be careful with this blog: I almost started to write about a show in which I’m pretty sure I stunk up the joint. It’s not that these shows aren’t just as relevant, if not more so, to my development as an improviser, but publicizing your insecurities almost always looks like a plea for affirmation, as Bill Stern recently discovered (via me) on the forums.
There’s an interesting paradox at the bottom of this. In my experience, this work is in large part about being vulnerable and open to your fellow players. Yet Liz Allen warned us that “your insecurities are a huge black hole for your teammates.”
So much of success in improv is dependent on confidence and “lightness of spirit” (Rafe Chase’s wonderful phrase) that questioning your own value can actually damage your ability to do the work. Hence the need for an environment in which every offer is supported. I know a lot of people will be very uncomfortable with this term, but it’s starting to seem to me like the best environment in which to create improv is one of unconditional love.
I thought it was so strange that all these tough-minded and super-rational improv teachers in Chicago kept telling us to love each other, but it’s starting to make rational sense. This just in: love is practical.
Take a situation in which someone is consistently making choices I don’t agree with. When I was much younger, my main goal would have been to get him to change by convincing him that I was right and he was wrong. Once I’d gotten a little older, I might have acknowledged his right to make those choices but then asked him to compromise and honor my desires as well as his. Still later I might have kept quiet and hoped that he’d eventually change in the way I wanted him to.
Now I think my job is to learn how to love those choices. No matter what.
I’ll keep you posted.
September 5, 2007
of course it does
When the clock radio alarm went off, I woke up to these words:
“. . . figured out pretty much how everything began. It takes me back to the first millisecond . . . ”
John Aielli, are there no limits to the areas of your expertise?