July 27, 2010

The Joy is in the Work

I’m making my way through Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi‘s great book Creativity again, and chapter 5, “The Flow of Creativity”, challenges me to examine some deep places in my life of creative work.   Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal work on the study of happiness–Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience–proposes that states and experiences of deep joy are very different that what we normally think of when we think of that which makes for happiness.  Weekend grilling, beach vacations, the various temptations of body that all seem to roll back the difficulties of life and create moments of ease and peace…these are things that are far from the world of what Csikszentmihalyi calls flow.   (See the Wikipedia article for a condensed explanation of the various components of flow.)

Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention is based on interviews with ninety-one “exceptional” individuals, leaders of innovation and cultural change in a wide range of “domains.”  The list of interviewees is a Who’s Who of brilliance, some famous, some not, but all of whom have made deep and powerful contributions to the world in the sciences, the arts, the humanities, religion, sports, and business and economics.   The book is an exciting read for me–I love looking into the minds of these kinds of people–but it also brings me up short as I think about where I am in my own pursuit of creative work.  In this time of transition from full and part-time ministry to full-time freelance writing, acting, directing, and teaching, I am deeply entrenched in an evaluation of my values, my heart, and my motivations for the work.

Here’s the opening statement of chapter 5:

“Creative persons differ from one another in a variety of ways, but in one respect they are unanimous: They all love what they do.  It is not the hope of achieving fame or making money that drives them; rather it is the opportunity to do the work that they enjoy doing.  Jacob Rabinow explains: “You invent for the hell of it.  I don’t start with the idea, ‘What will make money?’  This is a rough world; money’s important.  But if I have to trade between what’s fun for me and what’s money-making, I’ll take what’s fun.”  The novelist Naguib Mahfouz concurs in more genteel tones: “I love my work more than I love what it produces.  I am dedicated to the work regardless of its consequences.”  We found the same sentiments in every single interview.”

Csikszentmihalyi then goes on to explain that it’s the process of discovery that is the most compelling aspect of flow, and that our “expansive” tendencies are balanced by “conservative” tendencies that favor the status quo largely because of entropy.

Why does all this talk of flow and fun and loving what you do bring me up short?

Truth is, what I love to do…what I know I love to do…isn’t as much fun as it once was.  What I mean by that can be captured by a phrase that I used to use all the time, almost mantra-like, not because I needed to, but because it was simply the truth of my understanding of things.  That phrase was the title of this blog post.  “The joy is in the work.”  To be fully engaged in discovery, in writing and acting and making moments, with all its passion and sweat and faulty starts and reworking, with its potential for all manner of success and failure…this is sheer joy if the whole heart–the whole person–is in it.

Discovery is a primary human action.   I have to say that one of my favorite things in the world is to work with actors in teaching situations.   I will always cherish the moments where actors young and old make discoveries of moments; small, profound, imaginative understandings of a character in action, and emotion and life and intelligence and need and desire move across their faces and bodies in waves that are strong enough to break your heart.   That’s why audiences around the world pay big money to watch stories of human beings in action, making discoveries of mind, soul, heart, and body, and making decisions of pursuit based on those discoveries.

What I know is that these days I’m not yet in the “flow” of the work I love to do.  I’m rusty, fighting back all the fears that naturally come with the territory.  But if I don’t want to take on the fears, I should just sit down and shut up, because it is part of the nature of the fun to work at that which challenges us to our very core, given that we have the faith that we can rise and meet that challenge.

Faith.  There’s that word again, the way of moving through the world for which we were designed.

Saturday afternoon, in the second act of Man of La Mancha, I made a discovery in the prison scene early in the act that propelled me powerfully through the rest of the play, and I was in a deeper state of flow than I’ve been in a long time.   Emotion both dark and light was close to the surface and the moments slammed into place with clarity and force.  It was sheer joy.  Did the audience get anything special that day?  I really don’t know.  But my faith is that if I’ll stay true to the process of discovery, the work will grow, get richer.

Push back the entropy…discover…pursue joyful work…for God’s glory and the needs of the work, the whole heart is required…

Your kingdom come…

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July 24, 2010

Questions about Art and Critique

This post is simply a list of questions to consider when addressing the topic of art making and critique/criticism.

  • Are there artistic values and standards that apply to all forms of art?
  • Can those values and standards be articulated and meaningfully discussed?
  • Are there values and standards within a particular discipline (painting, acting, etc.) that are identifiable, unique, and agreed upon within that field?
  • Do the values and standards of a given field apply equally to various “classes” of art, such as “fine” art, “popular” art, “folk” art, “amateur” art, or “professional” art?
  • Do the values and standards of a given field apply equally across styles (realism, idealism, classical, baroque, American Musical Theatre…name your stylistic difference.)
  • What are the critic’s pre-assumptions concerning artistic values and standards?
  • Which of those pre-assumptions do you agree with?
  • Do the artistic values and standards of an international center (New York, Beijing, London, Moscow) apply to those working in the same field in regional and rural settings?
  • How do the various purposes of art making within a given particular context impact the use of critique and evaluation?
  • What is the point of critique and evaluation, anyway?
  • What is the role of self-critique and self-awareness in the creation of increasingly vibrant, relevant, and helpful work?
  • What is the point of trying to create “better” work than before?
  • What are the spiritual implications of living with the tensions of critique, both public and private?
  • Do the gatekeepers (critics, experts, leaders in a field of expertise) of a particular domain or discipline have a legitimate function, or are they merely extensions of a class-based call to power?
  • To what degree is criticism inherent in the act of making and distributing/displaying/performing art forms?
  • What is the personal responsibility of the artist in confronting the dangers and vulnerabilities inherent in bringing their art to a public?
  • How do we take the conversation regarding art making and art receiving beyond the point of “Did you like it?”  and “It’s just your opinion?”
  • Does anyone care about the conversation regarding artistic values and standards?   Should we?

That’s enough to drive your coffee conversations for awhile.   Add your own questions, as well as any references that might be helpful in sorting all this out.  Truth is, the questions may sound rather esoteric, but those of us who make art deal with them in the most practical terms every day.

As Cervantes tells his servant as they exit the prison…

“Courage…”

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July 23, 2010

Wondering About Critique…

Here’s a pretend letter from a pretend reader of a blog dedicated to thinking through various issues related to art-making and Christian faith.

“Dear Blogging Person,

How does a working artist deal with criticism?  I don’t mean mean-spirited people dishing out vindictive diatribes, but the simple, ongoing critique of one’s work that comes from all corners.  Evaluation is what I mean, I suppose.  (Public evaluation, especially.)   From family members to writers for the biggest media outlets in the land, everyone’s got an opinion.  (It’s all just opinion anyway, isn’t it?)  Given that I’m a typical artist, with my own inner nuttiness going crazy with insecurity and self-doubt, I find that I oscillate wildly between the ecstasy that follows one person’s rave and the debilitating depression that hits when someone in the paper or on the jury confirms what you always knew was true anyway, that your work was substandard to start with, and probably always will be.  I know about faith and believing and giving glory to God and all that, but come on…give me some practical advice here to keep me from just quitting what I’m doing, knowing there will always be people way, way better than me at what I do.  I used to have great fun doing what I do, but now not so much.   And one other thing: if I believe the good stuff and let it make me feel all rosy inside, don’t I have to take the bad stuff, too, even if it only soots up my soul?  (Soots isn’t a verb, but you get the idea.)  Thanks for your no doubt helpful answer.   Tom.  (as in ‘doubting.’)”

Before I get to answering poor Tom, how about you?  What do you tell him?   And yes, we are all talking to ourselves about this constantly, aren’t we?

And just to reveal one of my biases, I’ve always been a big fan of criticism, especially when its informed.

Thoughts?

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July 22, 2010

An Audience’s Misty Eyes

The eyes of an audience mean more to me than their words.   At last night’s talkback after Man of La Mancha, there were audience members who were meaningfully lost in the experience of the play, eyes a bit misty.   The “magic” of the play was working on them; you could see it.   Simple delight was there, but more than that, an experience of live theatre was traveling through both their emotional centers and their intellect.   You could see them tumbling around inside their hearts, reflecting on their own roles in the play, where they stood in relationship to the ideas tossed so cavalierly into the air by the “mad knight.”   We all think we’re “Aldonzas”, broken, less than we might have been, beat up, perhaps halfway to hell because of what’s in our hearts.   But Quixote looks Aldonza straight in the eye, not blind at all, but seeing more truly than any of the others, and tells her she is beautiful, pure, and “the woman each man holds secret in his heart,” Dulcinea.

And a few in the audience last night wondered if there was anyone in their lives who believed in them as Quixote believes in Aldonza.    “Is there anyone to see me,” perhaps the person in the third row, second seat, asks, “as someone other than the ugly fraud that I accuse myself of being every day?”

For me, the question is this:  do I see people as they might be, as they could be, or even, as they most truly are?  And do I treat them from that center, from that reality?  If what Cervantes suggests in this 500 year old story is at all true, then we have such power in our hands to be transforming agents of the realism our time is so in love with, so cynical about, so angry over.   And perhaps all is political, perhaps all is sheer and mere power play, but I believe we live in a world where the simply human transactions of respect, courtesy, kindness, belief, faith, and most powerfully, love as Christ lived it, have the power to change everything, one day at a time, one person at a time, one impossible dream at a time.

I see the mist in the eyes of the audience as what some call the shekinah glory.   The arrival of God’s presence and grace traveling on the windy voices of actors breathing in and out words and songs of the world not as it is, but as it ought to be.

Breathe, Jeff, breathe…

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July 15, 2010

Each Man’s Life Is But A Breath

So says David the King in Psalm 39.   This psalm gives us an image of a man wrestling with God, his relationship with Him burning in his chest.  He resolves not to speak, but then must.  He asks to know how long he will live, knowing that a “man’s life is but a breath.”

From the story of God forming humanity from the dust of the earth in Genesis 2, wherein he breathed into man “the breath of life”, to the outpouring of the Ruach (Spirit or breath) of God, to the notion that the scripture is literally, “God breathed”, breath holds a profound place in the story of us.   Breath keeps us alive, one cycle of inhale/exhale at a time.  To think of God breathing, each inhale/exhale birthing worlds, spirits, and truths, is to be reminded of Paul’s idea: “In Him we live and move and have our being.”

I struggle to breathe well when I’m performing.  Many people have said it to me over the years…I work too hard.   Knowing that breath provides the energy and structure needed for concentrated muscular effort in the performer’s major tools, speaking and singing, for years I have tried to figure out just how breath works.   And for years it has eluded me.    There is a simplicity to it, a trust that the body already knows how to do what it’s training to do.  As I sing and speak on stage, there is constant creative energy pouring through the body, and various body positions create pressure and tension that demands breath.

What’s on my mind is the relationship between muscular effort and breath.   The breath is what’s needed if life is to continue, and the muscular strength and direction provides mobility and physical action.  This relationship speaks to me of the tension between the Spirit of God (ruach in the Hebrew, pneuma in the Greek), and the exercise of our muscular (both physical and psychic) energy and will.   As followers of Christ, we constantly use the language of allowing the Spirit to work through us, or allowing Christ to work through us, knowing that we can’t do this or that that our walk of faith requires.  And yet, the muscularity can be applied by none other than ourselves, even as, in faith, we believe the Spirit of God to be providing “the strength” for muscular action we are taking.  And we speak of taking control, short-circuiting the work of the Spirit, which seems to me a lot like holding the breath instead of breathing.  Obviously, to hold breath is to cut yourself off from the very source of your life.  You turn red and pass out when you do it, and as a performer, it’s much the same.

In my current role in Man of La Mancha at Taproot Theatre, I walk a tightrope between the muscular energy I’ve chosen to apply to the character of Don Quixote, and the breath I need to sing the songs.  Last night’s performance was an experiment in moving deeper into a release of tension and depending more completely on breath and ease, and there were pluses and minuses as I moved through the play.  Again, it reminds me of the daily experiment we go through trying to find the balance of Spirit-life and human-life, which in my mind makes up what Dallas Willard and Richard Foster call “The With-God Life.”   My shortcoming as a performer echoes the shortcoming I have in my day-to-day world…I need more breath.

I know David is referring to the brevity of a man’s life when he says “each man’s life is but a breath.”  But as I was reading along in Psalm 39 this morning, it just hit me (or did the Living Word speak to me?), reminding me that the breath of life, on multiple levels of literal and metaphoric reality, belongs to God, and that our lives are given to us one breath at a time, each inhale/exhale a small life of its own.

Today, I will breathe…

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July 14, 2010

Impossible Dreams?

"Man of La Mancha" at Taproot Theatre

So last week Taproot Theatre opened Man of La Mancha.   I get the privilege of singing “The Quest” or as it’s more popularly known, “The Impossible Dream.”   While thrilled to have the opportunity to take on the role of Don Quixote, there is also something daunting about singing such a classic song.   Fortunately, the song has a power all its own, and again, it’s an honor to get to ride inside that power for a bit.

But what about the truth of it?  The age old argument is this: how should we see life?  The character known as the Duke challenges Cervantes, declaring that men must come to terms with life–or to see it– “as it is.”  Cervantes makes the argument for the idealist perspective, that we are better off when we see life “as it ought to be.”

Realism vs. Idealism.  It is a classic face-off between rose-colored glasses and clear eyed trifocals.   Isn’t the very notion of “impossible” dreams enough to tell you it’s just not smart to chase them?   Doesn’t Proverbs 12:11 say “He who works his land will have abundant food, but he who chases fantasies lacks judgment?”

But if you look at the song a little more closely, one thing becomes apparent:  the impossible dream is not the American Dream.  Bigger houses, cars, and careers is not what Quixote is referring to.   In our culture, the dreams we chase are dreams for ourselves.  We dream of this achievement, that accomplishment, this lifestyle, that notoriety, most of them variations on a rags to riches story in which fame, power, and money are the unreachable stars we’re chasing.   But of course, this is not what Don Quixote has in mind at all.   For him, vanity, selfishness, self-protection, personal goal-setting…all of that is nothing.   For the mad knight, the unreachable star is a world where the great wrongs are righted, where unbeatable foes can be beaten, where love is not perverse, brutal, and self-serving, but honorable, chaste (one of the more un-American words), and pure.   The unreachable star is a way of being in the world, a way of serving and fighting evil, one that might even go “wherever the road may lead,”  even if it leads into “hell, for a heavenly cause.”

There are thousands of variations on the theme of these kinds of impossible dreams.  How many injustices can we name?  How many poverties of body and spirit?  How many distortions of God’s intent must be pushed back against, windmills or not?  What a temptation to ride blithely past each of them, saying they are too big, too much, too entrenched, too powerful.   But there is a strategic move that Quixote makes that makes a lot of sense; he simply takes on the next thing.   The injustice he sees, he confronts.   Reminds of me a bit of the day-to-day strategy of Jesus.   “The enchanter may confuse the outcome, but the effort remains sublime.”

To which a brutalized Aldonza, replies, understandably, “Lies, all lies.”

Are we dreaming these kinds of impossible dreams today?  Will we confront one before the day is over?  Or do we functionally exist as if to do such chasing is madness?   In a variation of one of my facebook friends status lines, do unbeatable foes and unrightable wrongs dread you waking up today?

The common, the epic…

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July 8, 2010

Morning Prayer

Sitting on the back deck, on the western side of the house, and the sun is just touching the tips of my neighbor’s trees.  The stillness intimates the coming day’s heat.  A few moments ago, a small bird sat on a branch just off to my left and sang me a couple of songs as I prayed, his body bouncing up and down with the force of his air.  A split-second decision, and he was off.  I followed his line of flight, and he stopped abruptly, landing in the neighbor’s tree.  I wondered how, at that speed, he’d made up his mind about where to land.  And then I realized he didn’t really think, of course…he just did what he was built to do.

Mornings like this make me think prayer is what we are meant to do.  To commune with God in ways that are particular to us, and yet centuries old.  Words spoken to Him, or no words; thoughts of Him speaking, caring about our petty concerns among the billions of others on the planet.  Talking to Him about those who the Spirit brings to mind  (the boy with asthma, the man who needs a car to buy, the cast of players whose voices are tired, the full list of those requesting prayers of the church), which are of course, requests, but they are more fully thoughts of care, concern, and hopefulness.  With all the conversations about the nature of prayer, this morning it seems simple.  To sit with creation and life and a psalm, longing for Him, for a word from Him, for some sense of what it means to be alive and choose branches to land on throughout the day.

The trees rustle a bit, giving me hope that the day’s heat may not be so crushing after all.   It’s a full day the Lord hath made: morning conversation about the future, about possibilities and planting seeds, then to church briefly to pick up music for an afternoon rehearsal, then all things La Mancha and tonight’s second preview.   Then late night reconnection with my wife and son, and finally to bed with hope of rising tomorrow to meet God again here, reflecting on what happened, and the various satisfactions and disappointments He and I will walk through together.   How or why God would offer me any attention during His day with 7 billion people and a million times as many stars in unknown, but I’ll take any participation in His Spirit He’ll allow.

The roses next door, fully open, hope to catch the sun soon.   Let the day begin.

Consider Abraham: he believed God…

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July 7, 2010

To Write for God

Thomas Merton said (and I’m paraphrasing without my source in front of me)  to write for yourself is in the end, sickening.  To write for others is more noble, but the only way to speak to many, truthfully and well, is to write for God.

There’s lots to write about.  Man of La Mancha opens this Friday at Taproot Theatre, and I continue to tilt with the windmills involved in playing Cervantes/Quixote.   It’s both thrilling and invigorating, and will no doubt–from my point of view–be a highlight of my acting work of recent years.  At the same time, it’s scary, thought-provoking, even indicting as I work to fill these words, these moments, and these songs.   Impossible dreams, indeed.

The work at the Northwest Church, from a paid staff point of view, is drawing to an end.  This past Sunday, Chris Goldman announced that as of January 1st, 2011, I will be resigning my part-time post as Real Encounter Catalyst Leader and Worship Leader.  Lots of implications to this, but to reflect on my work of the past three years at Northwest is humbling, satisfying, and disappointing all at once.   One day I will write this experience in ways that I hope will honor the people who have allowed me to serve among them.  Whether it’s a piece of fiction or non-fiction remains to be seen, but I have my ideas.

On the family side, my daughter Amy is now firmly ensconced in New York City, living on the Upper West Side, suffering from the heat wave currently hitting the country.   Working hard at the business of living and acting, she seems resolute and happy to be doing what she’s doing, and I couldn’t be more proud.   My son Daniel is home for the summer after a bit of opera exploration in Italy, and is currently preparing to appear in a new musical at the end of August.   Our conversations often run into the night, and between the two of us, we may figure life out yet.  And my sweet wife continues to shore me up as she soldiers lovingly on with the business of living with her own version of the crazed and faulty knight.

“Look always forward.   In last year’s nest, there are no birds this year.”    So says Don Quixote as he stands vigil the night before his dubbing.    I thought about it, and tore out the carpet in my office revealing a beautiful, but somewhat beat-up, hardwood floor.  I repainted the walls a rich version of my favorite yellow (I could write about why yellow has become my favorite in the past couple of years), and am in the middle of building a new nest from which I hope powerful new work emerges.

The point is, there’s lots to write about.   How about the spill in the gulf?  The World Cup?   The upcoming elections and the projected make-up of the next Congress?   What it means to befriend the poor?  What art demands and why?  Why the Bible continues to demand a fidelity so many young people just can’t seem to muster up?   The discipline of putting words on the page no matter what?  The efficacy of prayer?  The design of the human for faith?  The means by which we pick and keep and cultivate friends?  The nature of seeds and the ongoing explosion of new life in the world?   The stripping of language into the mundane and the trivial?

Summer has arrived in Seattle.   A new play opens, temperatures soar, light bounces off the wooden tables at the coffee shop, silhouetting the woman rearranging her purse, her coffee cups, and who knows, perhaps her life.    Another woman hustles in for her latte, apologizing for her lack of shoes.   A gray-haired man takes a table near the front as upbeat chatter mixes with the early morning jazz.    I’m in the back, in the corner, feeling much better now that we’ve talked, reader, you and me.

Do we write for God?  Do we live for Him, to discover Him, to reveal Him, to experience Him?  Daniel and I have conversations about the experience of God and what it means to sing for Him, to create for Him, to live the entire human enterprise on His behalf.   Do we, as Paul enjoined, do whatever we do for the glory of God?   And if we say we do, what do we mean?

To write for God is no doubt many things, but it is at least to be present, to speak truth, to listen, to persuade, to reflect, and to work.   To bear witness.   There are times I’m afraid to bear witness to life as I see it, yet that is the job.   Being faithful is nothing less than showing up for the day’s work.

Today, God help me, I will bear witness…

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June 24, 2010

A Few New Words, Trusting More Will Come

A good friend told me she’d come to my blog for her monthly fix of whatever I was mulling over, and as it turns over, there was no evidence of any mulling.  Nothing.  Nada.   No writing for the past month.   “What’s up?” she said.

Well, much has been up, but and much has been mulled, but the desire to put it down for the world to see just hasn’t been there.  Even this morning, this gorgeous morning with it’s squirrel running along the fence, the rattle of the trash truck, and the small, clinking sounds of my wife rummaging around in the kitchen, even this morning I don’t have anything bubbling to the top of my thought-life that I’m all hot and bothered to blog about.

Maybe the post should be called “Hunkering Down.”

If art-making is about life, then I suppose what I’m mulling is what part of life my art-making is to be about next.   Subject matter, media, forms, structures, themes…thoughts and images suggesting themselves pretty rapidly moment to moment even as I’m working on my daily life stuff.   As I plan worship services, memorize lines for Man of La Mancha, and have far-ranging conversations with my son about his life with music and and friends and God, flashes of intuition assert themselves, and I see plays to direct, stories to write, and perhaps even spaces to construct and symposiums to dream up and facilitate.

I am bit reluctant to write, perhaps, because I am unsure of the next moment.  Nothing new in that…any thought of assurance of the next moment is illusion at best, but I am simply responding to an intuition that there is much writing to come, and the moment for now is to allow it to do just that.   Come of its own accord, as opposed to me muscularly lifting it into the world.  Again, not that there isn’t muscular work to do; there is, and will be, lots of it.   Maybe I’m just talking about timing.

Anyway, here I am, inching along, offering a couple of words on a gorgeous morning for those who might like them.

Glad for the sun…

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May 12, 2010

Connections

This has tremendous implications for any organization out trying to do good in the world. (Not to mention weight gain and loss.)  Part of me wants to say, “Duh,” but on the other hand, there is something profound about the way the material is presented.  My favorite metaphor is the graphite vs. diamond illustration.  It’s not what’s in the carbon…it’s the connections.

Made me think…

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