The One You Feed - Stephen Nachmanovitch on Improvising in Life

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

Stephen Nachmanovitch performs and teaches internationally as an improvisational violinist and at the intersection of music, dance, theatre, and multimedia arts. Stephen has presented masterclasses and workshops at Julliard and many conservatories and universities. In this episode, Stephen and Eric discuss his new book, The Art of Is: Improvising as a Way of Life, which is an exploration of the creative process, especially the social dimensions of the creative process and a philosophical meditation on living, living fully, and living in the present.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Stephen Nachmanovitch and I Discuss Improvising in Life and…His book, The Art of Is: Improvising as a Way of LifeThat creativity is absolutely worthless without an ethical foundationThe ethics of creativityBuddhism and creativityWhy improvisation is so important to himHis interest in the creative process across all fieldsThat the template for improvisation is conversationThe role of listening and equality in improvisational musicThe relationship between impermanence, imperfection, and improvisationThe relationship between chivalry and the phrase “yes, and…”That play isn’t what you do, it’s how you do itThe relationship between discipline and freedomArt as the act of balancingHow self correction is a lot easier without the added burden of guiltThe metaphor of a child learning to walk and the approach of “positive feedback only”What it means to “stamp out nouns”That when you create something that’s “original” it means, simply, that you are the originStephen Nachmanovitch Links:freeplay.comFacebookTwitterTalkspace is the online therapy company that lets you connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere at any time at a fraction of the cost of traditional therapy. It’s therapy on demand. Visit www.talkspace.com or download the app and enter Promo Code: WOLF to get $100 off your first month.Kettle & Fire: Bone Broth and soups carefully crafted by world-class chefs, made with the best whole ingredients and the bones of humanely raised animals delivered right to your door. Go to www.kettleandfire.com/wolf and use promo code WOLF for 20% off.Calm App: The app designed to help you ease stress and get the best sleep of your life through meditations and sleep stories. Join the 85 million people around the world who use Calm to get better sleep. Get 40% off a Calm Premium Subscription (a limited time offer!) by going to www.calm.com/wolfIf you enjoyed this conversation with Stephen Nachmanovitch on Improvising in Life, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Finding Your Creativity with Julia CameronPower of Poetry with Ellen BassRalph WhiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

your freedom doesn't do you much good if you don't also have some discipline and also have some technique. And your technique doesn't do you much good unless you also have some freedom. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast

is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor. What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Stephen Nachmanovich. He performs and teaches internationally as an improvisational violinist and at the intersections of music, dance, theater, and multimedia arts. Stephen has presented masterclasses and workshops at Juilliard and many conservatories and universities. Today, Stephen and Eric discuss his new book, The Art of Is, which is a philosophical meditation on living, living fully, living in the present. Hi, Stephen. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. It's a pleasure to be with you. I am happy to have you on. You and I have been

battling technical difficulties for the last close to 30 minutes here, but I think we are in good shape now. We're going to discuss your book, which is called The Art of Is, Improvising as a Way of Life, which we have been doing here. But before we get into that, we're going to start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he

looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, The Art of Is is an exploration of the creative process, and especially the social dimensions of the creative process. And creativity just sounds absolutely wonderful, and people think we need more of it. And to be able to improvise sounds wonderful. But there have been throughout history and very recently in our own time, people who are skilled at improvisation, who are demagogues, who are operating from a point of view of greed, hate, and delusion, and who may have the skills to sway millions of people. So creativity is absolutely worthless without an ethical foundation. In many ways, I mean,

it's interesting that you and I get to talk to each other now with your preoccupation with the story of the two wolves, because really that's the theme of the entire book, is the ethics of creativity and what we can do for each other. Yeah, what I really loved about the book, there were a bunch of different things in it that really spoke to me. And some of it was exactly like you said, sort of the communal aspects of creativity, what that means, but also the deep interweaving of a topic that is near and dear to my heart, which is Buddhism, along with the subject of creativity. And so I thought we'd start by talking about improvisation in general. And by its nature, we're going to be talking about improvisation in a musical sense. Often you're a musician, I'm a musician. So we're going to be talking about improvisation in a musical sense

often you're a musician I'm a musician so there's going to be some of that I want to also make sure that we're talking about improvisation and creativity as it comes to leading a good life because that's really what we what we focus on here so as we talk about creativity and all that I'll keep trying to sort of steer us back to general application, but let's talk about improvisation, why it's so important to you. It's really been a huge pillar of your career. Yes. Well, I'm an improvisational violinist, and I sort of fell into, in my 20s, becoming an improviser, not knowing where I was going. And I'd been trained as a violinist since I was a kid. Music was not going to be my profession, though I had a very deep love of music. And due to a series of events in my 20s, I became more and more and more interested in the creative process across all fields, you know, poetry, art, mechanics, craftsmanship, dance.

violinist and started giving concerts, both myself and with other musicians and with dancers and theater people and others, I got to spend time with Yehudi Menuhin, who was one of the great violinists of the 20th century. And he became a kind of mentor of mine. And he told me that I should really write a book about improvisation, meaning how do you, as a classically trained musician who's always been familiar with music as dots on a piece of paper, get to abandon the dots and simply play? And that actually became my first book on this subject, which was Free Play, which was published in 1990. And as I started writing about this, I very quickly realized that it really is not about music. It's not about any particular art form. It's about all art forms. And the template for improvisation is simply conversation. You know, we all have conversations every day. We don't write down what we're going to say before we say it. We are lucid.

We're interesting. We pause for our partner and give our partner a chance to say something. And so there's all kinds of rules of interface and improvisational art that appear simply in the act of conversation. And even very composed art, books and so forth, they always begin in those moments when you're doodling on a napkin, you know, where something comes to you. Where does it come from? Well, that's a good question, but it comes to you and you do something with it. And perhaps if you're doing a more composed art form, you will then edit that work and maybe edit it hundreds

of times until it comes out right. But the act of editing is also kind of improvisational. In order to edit a piece of writing or edit a tape or a piece of written music or a painting, tape or a piece of written music or a painting, you have to have a certain quality of freedom and ruthlessness. You have to have the courage and ruthlessness to cross out a line that you really enjoyed writing. So improvisation is the root of all human creativity and really of all human interaction, cooking, cleaning, having conversations, playing with our children, playing with our friends. These are all forms of improvisation. So if somebody gets up on a stage and plays an instrument, that's wonderful, but it's simply an extension of what we all do.

You use an example in the book fairly early on that I thought was really interesting, and you basically described merging onto a freeway as a type of improvisation. Say a little bit more about that. Well, it's a freeway fairly close to where I live here in Charlottesville, Virginia, and it's what they call a merge lane, meaning that you're driving on the freeway, there's an exit and an entrance right next to each other, and they're kind of merging into each other. So in principle, it would be very easy to have accidents all the time because people are coming on and coming off on the same spot.

But the fact is accidents happen very rarely because we are paying attention to each other. And it's a really interesting case for me. I mean, traffic is a great example of structured improvisation because we're all driving cars in different directions for different goals with our own personal lives and our own personal errands. And yet we're able to pay attention to each other most of the time. I mean, accidents happen, but they're fortunately fairly rare. And we're able to have courtesy for each other. Now, the interesting thing about when I mentioned that episode on the freeway in The Art of Is, what I was thinking there was that, let's say, if you're an actor on stage or a musician on stage, we can improvise with each other with no prior plans and no rules and nothing

written down, but we're also paying exquisitely mindful attention to each other, looking at the expression in the other person's eyes and looking at body language and feeling breath. And these are all the subtle signals that we're playing off as we improvise together. But with traffic, you are communicating with another human being through the momentum and acceleration and deceleration of these very large, fast-moving, blunt-ed objects. And yet we still manage to have these subtle communications with each other. And we're still able to improvise our pathway through the traffic of that freeway. Yeah, I thought that was just a really good example of a day-to-day improvisation we do.

I also love tying it back to conversation. You say in the book that those of us who gravitate towards improvisational music do so because we enjoy relating to other human beings as equals. That is the core of the experience for me. Exactly. Now, in classical music, I spend a lot of time working with classical musicians in universities and other settings. And the fact is that classically trained musicians are actually incredibly subtle and free artists who are able to communicate with each other in these wonderful ways. But let's say the setup of a concert is that you've got three levels. You have the audience, which sits there quietly looking up at the stage. You have the musicians on stage

who are highly trained, highly skilled people who've worked for years to be able to present this music, but they are being the conduits for the third level, which is the often dead composer who's sitting up behind them in the ethers. And the composer in this system has access to this godlike creative process, and the musicians become the vehicles for it. So what interests me about improvisational music is that those levels collapse into one and that we're all together in this depending on each other. There's no score, there's no plan, it is listening. If you can't have a score and a plan and a set of instructions or a syllabus. What you have is listening to each other, and that means respecting each other. So improvisation in that sense of musicians or

other artists working together is a kind of template for democracy. It's a kind of template for people listening to each other, paying attention, engaging in give and take, and also stepping out of each other's way. Even in an extremely composed situation where the string quartet is playing Beethoven, chamber musicians know that if you can't hear what your partner is playing, then you're playing too loud. Yep. And just like conversation, right? Conversation works when we relate to each other as equals.

When we don't, we're not really having conversation. Yes. We are talking at each other. Right. Okay. And that brings us back to your two wolves and to the ethical question that we discussed at the beginning. Because the essence of the improvisational situation is this business of partnership or democracy or whatever you want to call it. to call it. If one partner chooses to dominate the scene or to simply be clever or to appear talented, then that kind of breaks the spell. And so that ethical dimension of improvisation

is present in all of our daily encounters. And we've all experienced these things. We've all experienced a conversation with a friend where you suddenly realize, oh, I just stepped on you. You wanted to say something that was really important and I just ignored it and I stepped on you. And for people to have the honesty to realize that means that there's a basis for the friendship. And that's part of improvisational teaching also. You mentioned that improvising was an interest of yours. And then as you begin to study Buddhism, you begin to get interested in the other imps, impermanence and imperfection, and how those are all related. Yes.

Well, that's a huge theme of the book, of course, because, I mean, the fundamental teachings of Buddhism are about impermanence. They're about the impermanence. I'm sitting here and talking to you through a computer and we're now listening to a telephone ringing in the background. And if this were another kind of conversation, we would consider that telephone to be a disturbance or noise that we want to get rid of. But in the improvisational situation, in the art of is, the telephone is ringing. And that's part of the environment.

And if you're a musician, that's a sound. And that's a sound that you can react to and interact with. And so nothing is outside the scope of your creativity. Okay? In Buddhist teaching and practice, we're aware of the interconnectedness, the interdependence of ourselves with all beings and all things. So the telephone that just rang or the computer that's mediating, there's a computer in front of me and another computer in front of you, and we both have microphones and cables and all that stuff. Okay, so those objects from a certain point of view seem to be just solid objects, but the aluminum in the computer came from somewhere. It was mined from somewhere. The plastic came from somewhere. You can trace the plastic all the way back to the trees of the dinosaur age that decayed and fell into swamps and gradually became petroleum and so forth. So there's a long story to that plastic.

The circuit boards inside the computer and inside the microphone were constructed not only using copper that was mined from somewhere. They were constructed using various rare earth elements that were mined possibly by child labor in Africa and processed in China and shipped over here to the United States. So actually, this solid computer that's in front of me contains a million stories. It contains infinitely many stories, biology, physics, chemistry, history, labor relations, the family relations of the people whose work all went into the plastic and the aluminum and the wiring and so forth. So Buddhism talks about emptiness of inherent existence. So when Western people hear the word emptiness, we get all freaked out because we think that it's some kind of nihilism or saying things don't exist. But what it's really saying is that this computer, which I can tap on and

it makes a noise and it's hard, so it's there. But this computer is full of these millions of many stories. The only thing it's empty of is an existence, an inherent existence all by itself. And similarly, you and I, we are not existing as individuals bounded by a skin, even though that's part of our story. We're interdependent with a very, very, very large world and a vast amount of stories that went into making us and we'll die and the computer will disappear into a garbage heap somewhere and all of this will recycle so when you play a piece of music that lasts for five minutes and that didn't exist five minutes ago. Sometimes when people ask me to define improvisation, I say I play music that's less than five minutes old.

So you're exercising impermanence and you're inviting anybody who hears you play to participate in that impermanence. Now, when the phone rang a few minutes ago, or you had a phone ring earlier in our conversation, again, in another kind of context, that would be snipped out of the recording because it's noise or a disturbance or something like that. Chris is going to try. Yeah, well, good luck, because it's now the subject of our conversation. That's right. So it's got to be in there. That's right. He's pretty good at that kind of thing. God bless him. But yeah. So that's imperfection.

Yes. The telephone ringing is an imperfection. Okay, now if you and I are having a conversation and we're really juicy and into it, and then there's the imperfection of a phone ringing or a truck driving by or some kind of noise, and you say, oh, can you take that again? Well, you can't take it again. You can't take it again because it's never the same. So to participate in the three imps of improvising, impermanence, and imperfection means living in the world where the phone is ringing, living in the world where the trucks

are driving by and disturbing our conversation, living in the world where we understand that global warming is taking place and is going to disrupt our civilization. And that's why I call the book The Art of Is. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app,

on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say at one point in the book, interruption means having your concentration spoiled but nothing can spoil your concentration if every change that comes into your sensorium is part of the game yes yes you make it all part of what we do i want to circle back just a little bit to the nature of altruism and of viewing each other as equals, because you do something interesting in the book. One of the things that most people probably know about improvisation, if they know about improv theater, is they've probably heard the phrase, yes, and,

right? Your partner says something and you just go, yes, and. But you use a term in the book, and I don't know if you were borrowing it from somebody else, I don't remember, but you talked about reframing that under the idea of chivalry. And I thought that was really fascinating. Let's talk a little bit about that. Sure. Well, it was actually Keith Johnston. He was a British actor and director who in the 1950s was director of the big West End theaters in London. And then he moved to Calgary, Alberta, and founded the Loose Moose Improvisational Theater. And he's been doing theater sports ever since, which is improvisational theater played as a competitive sport started between Canadian cities, and it's now all over the world.

And he used chivalry. It was actually the yes and meme in improvisational theater really started from his teaching. But he uses the word chivalry, which I like because it's a kind of old-fashioned word. the word chivalry, which I like because it's a kind of old-fashioned word. Yes, and has become a little bit overused now and a little bit too much of a slogan, even though what it represents is really, really important. And I kind of like the idea of going back to formerly obsolete words that can be shined up and reused again since they've been out of style for a while. In fact, in the place in the book where I talk about chivalry, I also bring up a man named Del Close in Chicago. And he trained Bill Murray and half the actors that you can think of now who are out in the world. And Del Close said to his students that your job as an

improviser is not to come up with a clever line. Your job as an improviser is to make your partner's shitty line sound good. Yeah, my favorite improvisational partner is Chris, who's also the editor, and that's his job, is to make my terrible lines sound good. Although we play music together too. And it's actually, he serves the same purpose. He makes my stuff sound great. Yeah. Yeah. I love that idea of sort of just tying it back again to it's about this relationship. What you were just saying a couple of minutes ago, as we were talking about emptiness, we kind of moved on pretty quickly from a really deep topic that we may circle back to. And it's one of my favorite topics, but even that emptiness, we kind of moved on pretty quickly from a really deep topic that we may circle back to and is one of my favorite topics. But even that emptiness, what we're

talking about is relationship. And what we're talking about is context. Yes. My main mentor in this life was the anthropologist and philosopher, biologist Gregory Bateson, who died in 1980. And context was perhaps the most important word in Gregory's work. Behavioral scientists, psychologists, sociologists, all those people used to talk about something called behavior, as though you could watch a rat running around in a maze and quantify its learning curves and so forth. And Gregory really discovered how to make it clear that context is the one thing that's really important there in learning. So that even at the level of the rat in the learning experiment, the rat may learn that it gets an electric shock by turning left in the maze.

That may stop the rat from turning left, but it doesn't stop the rat from exploring. Because exploration is the context, it's not the behavior. One of the things that was really, really important in my young life when I was a college student and later, I guess through now, is play, is understanding what play is. And this was actually the thing that brought me together with Gregory first, because he had written a great deal about play. Play isn't a game. Play isn't what you do.

It's how you do it. It's the context. You know, the dog comes up to you with his mouth open and his teeth showing, but his tail is wagging. And so you give him your hand to put in his mouth because you know he's playful, you know. So the tail is classifying. The tail is setting the context for the mouth. And we have all these kinds of subtle things that are context markers for the message this is play. computer technology, and so-called artificial intelligence, because computers can be programmed to beat you or me in chess,

even if we were really fantastic chess players. But a computer can be programmed with the rules of chess and to perform millions of moves per second and work out how to beat you or me. But a computer can't play chess because a computer can't play. A computer can't take pleasure if you and I are playing chess and you make a really clever move that really screws me up.

I can enjoy your move because we're playing. So play is a huge part of this. You know, you play music. You play plays in the theater. You play with paints when you're painting. But would it be safe to say that in that case that you can play music? Because that spirit of play does not get brought in automatically. That's correct. Okay. You know, Picasso and other artists have talked about how,

as an adult artist, you have to recover what you lost as a child. Now, if you're a child who draws really well, and then you go to art school, and then you learn how the masters did it, and then you learn what your teachers are telling you, it's possible to lose some of that pleasure you had of mucking around with paints and getting dirty. And some of that loss of pleasure may be really worthwhile because you're learning some rules of the game and you're learning some techniques that can be really great to know. But then once you know those techniques, you have to be able to drop that and get back to being a child

and playing with some innocence again. But you're playing with innocence and experience. The artists who really move us are playing with their experience and our experience of having suffered, of having lost our innocence, lost our innocence, of having had hard things happen to us in our life. But through images and words and music and architecture and storytelling and myth and dream and other forms, we begin to play with those stories again. with those stories again. So there's this balancing teeter-totter that's always going on between innocence and experience, between freedom and form, between discipline and freedom. Your freedom doesn't do you much good if you don't also have some discipline and also have some technique. And your technique doesn't do you much good unless you also have some discipline and also have some technique. And your technique

doesn't do you much good unless you also have some freedom. So we're constantly wiggling around over that balance point. Yeah. You say this is slightly different, but encapsulates it a little bit, which is art is the act of balancing, knowing what to prepare, what to leave to the moment and the wisdom to know the difference. You know, and I think all those things you just said, those two opposites, it's always sort of knowing at which time do we need more of this or more of that and being able to move freely between them is so critical. I teach this program called Spiritual Habits and in it one of the principles is the middle

way, right? Which doesn't necessarily mean you just always pick the average, right? You may have to pull from both sides, both extremes, but if you end up stuck on one side or the other, then the thing either becomes sort of dead or it just spins out of control. Right. Well, we're both sitting in chairs at the moment talking to each other. And sitting in a chair means, you know, if I tilt slightly over to the right, then my muscles on the left know how to pull me back up. And if I did, if I then tilt slightly to the left, my muscles on the right know how to pick me up up. And if I did, if I then tilt slightly to the left, my muscles on the

right know how to pick me up. And we're actually doing this constantly, millisecond by millisecond. So the middle way of just sitting up straight in a chair is actually a million movements, you know, and again, back to the example of driving. If you're holding the steering wheel and driving forward, you're actually constantly wheeling the steering wheel back and forth a little bit because you're always a little bit to the right and now correct to the left, a little bit to the left and now correct to the right. So we are steering, okay? And steering means a constant dynamic change and balancing act. Now, the thing that we don't do when we're driving is we don't, you know, slap yourself in the face and say, oh, damn it, I was too far to the right. Oh, damn it,

I was too far to the left, you know, because you'd kill yourself in five seconds if you did that. You just accept the balance and the constant mistakes. The great 12th century Zen master Dogen said, life is one continuous mistake. I do a lot of one-on-one coaching with people and we're talking about maintaining, in a lot of cases, a behavior for a long period of time. I want exercise to become part of my life, right? I always want to do it. And I always talk about the fact that like, we're always getting off track. Something always comes up. We always get off track. It's about how quickly do we get back on track? How do we sort of, like you said, sort of just smooth that out? And you had a line in the book I was headed to, which is that self-correction is a lot easier without the added burden of guilt.

And what I see happen in people a lot is we get off track and all of a sudden the voice starts about, oh, well, I knew I couldn't stick with it. I'm no good. And I always just say the most important thing is just get back on track with the minimum amount of drama. Like drop all that noise because that noise just drags us further off and just back on. You use that line, self-correction is easier without the burden of guilt. When you were talking about,

what's the gentleman's name? Wonder? What's his first name? Al Wonder. Yeah. He says positive feedback only. Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah. So Al Wonder, he's an old, old, old friend of mine from Berkeley. That is, he's from New York. We knew each other when we both lived in Berkeley. He now lives in Australia. I now live in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was an extraordinary dancer and became a kind of guru of dance theater improvisation, movement improvisation, creating theater with body and voice. creating theater with body and voice. So he talks about this wonderful example of the one-year-old child who's just learning to walk first day. And I was there with both of my sons when they were one year old and did this, and we've all been with children or loved ones at this moment. So what does the kid

do when he's walking? The kid is actually, you know, if he's walking from here to there across a distance of six feet, he or she is falling down 10 times. You know, he or she is falling down, getting up, falling down, getting up, and makes it across the six-foot distance. And what do the people around this child do? They're applauding and just screaming with delight and how wonderful this is. They aren't saying, now, and insert the child's name, next time you walk, if you lift your knees higher and hold your back straighter, you'll walk even better. They aren't saying that because they know when the child falls down, the child knows that they fell down. You know, they don't need us to tell them that they fell down. that they fell down. You know, they don't need us to tell them that they fell down.

They just thrive on the approbation of our congratulating them and loving them unconditionally. And, you know, similarly, when musicians play a tone that's out of tune, whatever that means in that particular context. They know it. You know, they don't need a teacher to wrap them on the fingers and say, no, no, no. What they do need is a teacher who will identify what was interesting about that performance and help them amplify that. And the thing is, when people fall down and make mistakes, we know it, you know, and we usually do

a pretty good job of kicking ourselves. We don't need the teacher to kick us too. We just need the teacher to be a witness, you know. That doesn't mean you don't pretend that the person didn't make a mistake. It doesn't mean that you're sort of glossing over and everything is fine, but you're trusting that the person knows what happened. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really?

That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And that they have the ability to correct themselves just as our muscles have the ability to pull us back up when we lean over. Right. The mistake doesn't become the focus of everything. There are other things that can be focused on. And, you know, this is so important in how we parent, how we teach all that, but it's also so important in how we work with it ourselves because we've internalized so many of those voices so well now, right?

And I just loved that line. Self-correction is a lot easier without the burden of guilt, right? Because guilt and recrimination and the self-criticism, it shuts down our ability to learn, you know, and that's what we need. If we're going to improve anything, we have to be able to learn. That's the entire game. When harshness gets introduced into the equation, whether from ourselves or others, our learning is impeded. Let's switch now and talk back again to your mentor Bateson, something that he was fond of saying that he got from another friend of his, Anatole Holt, which is stamp out nouns. I love this. Let's talk about this idea, stamp out nouns.

Yes, Gregory was very fond of saying that. And it's almost a mantra that we can remember and use all the time. That doesn't mean, I mean, you and I are having a conversation in English, not Navajo or some other language. And English and most Western languages are based on lots of nouns. And we can use them, and that's fine. But we also have to not take them too seriously. So it's really, before when we talked about emptiness and impermanence, we talked about this solid object, the computer that's sitting in front of me, and how it's really a network of stories

and it's a network of change and it's just temporarily a solid object. So we say the noun computer and we treat it as a thing and it temporarily certainly is a thing. thing. But by using names, we kind of stamp onto our minds the idea of permanence. And, you know, not just of permanence, but the idea that we don't have to explore this thing any further. explore this thing any further. So if I look at the computer and I say it's a computer and I can say what brand it is and something else, I can then move on. My eyes can gloss over it and they might not see the interesting whatever that I could learn from investigating the computer more deeply. So in a sense, names often are, they don't have to be, but they very, very often are a way of stopping investigation. And I like to talk about improvisation as a tool for investigating reality. And certainly what we

acquire in art making or in looking at art or enjoying art is taking things or taking patterns or sounds that are used to seeing and hearing and investigating them more deeply. seeing and hearing and investigating them more deeply. So to use names as a way to stop investigation is kind of an unfortunate development that flows out of the blessing of language that we have and, you know, our wonderful capacity to name things and understand them. So we have to take our understandings as provisional and as contingent and temporary. You tell a story in the book, you reference Ronald Reagan when he was running for governor of California. He famously said, if you've seen one redwood tree, you've seen them all. If you've seen down redwood forests. Okay.

So he said, well, if you see one tree, you've seen them all. And that means it's just a name. One redwood tree is the same as another. But of course, we all know all of us who've been to the redwoods or to any forest of any kind knows that every tree is different from every other tree. And there's something to learn from the community of organisms that that tree is a story for, you know, and the intercommunication of that tree with the rest of creation. Of course, the reduction to absurdity, as they say in mathematics, of cutting down all the redwood trees so that we can temporarily have some more profits for a few companies, is that the ecology gets destroyed and the other organisms whose lives are linked to

those trees get destroyed. And there's a cascade of destruction, which ultimately, of course, comes back on us, as we're seeing in the catastrophic fires in California and Australia and Spain and Portugal last year and Siberia, you know, all over the world. So to say that you know what something is because you know its name, which is really what Ronald Reagan was saying, falsifies reality and it impoverishes reality. It leads to an impoverished world. Yeah, I love it. You say that from his limited point of view, he was right. Because as soon as you put the label tree on a natural phenomenon, you begin to see the name and not the thing itself. And so that's our challenge is to be able to see past the labels that we've

put on things. I've been very into Zen study and practice. And I love, you know, form is emptiness, emptiness is form, right? It's both these things, we talk about the computer, and it's this collection of stories. And it's an object sitting on my desk that performs a certain function, you know, and so labels can be enormously useful. And our brain can use these things like, okay, I don't have to investigate everything that's around me all the time, or I would just implode. But you've got to be able to move between these things, you've got to be able to move between form and emptiness, emptiness and form, we've got to be able to move between we see the label and that's

functional, and how do we not see the label so we can get back to the freshness of seeing the thing itself? Exactly. Put your finger right on it. In other Zen texts, the Sandokai talks about form and emptiness like the foot before and the foot behind walking. Those two feet are constantly changing places and propelling each other forward. And you need both views. You know, you need to be able to, going back to the example of driving in traffic, you need to be able to focus on a certain set of things

when you're driving so that you can drive safely, which means seeing things as things and seeing a truck as a truck. But you also need in your life to be able to widen your focus and see the connections between the truck and a million other things, what they called the 10,000 things in nowism, you know. So you need both, you know, just as in any music or any other art form, you need form and you need freedom. And even if you're doing a new kind of music that breaks all the former rules, you're still doing something and it's going to have some rules,

you know, the rules that you make up or the rules that come from the structure of your body. So, we're constantly vibrating between form and freedom, form and freedom. So, balance is really, that could have been another title of the book. Yeah. I'm going to read another section from your book, and it's going to cause me to do a couple of terrible pronunciations because I always get them wrong. But it's Heraclitus and Ecclesiastes. Did I get that right? Heraclitus. Yeah. Well, Heraclitus, it could be. Who knows? He lived 500 BC. I never met him. So let's say Heraclitus, if you want, and Ecclesiastes. I'm amazed I got the Ecclesiastes, because I always mess that up. That's pretty good, yeah. section, Ecclesiastes said, there is nothing new under the sun, that every event is part of cycles

that have repeated forever. Heraclitus said, you can't step in the same river twice. Everything changes, nothing repeats. Both were right. Rub those two perspectives together like rubbing your hands together. Pattern and change move as a pair, like the foot before and the foot behind in walking. And you just referenced that foot before and behind. But I love how in this section you're talking about with improvisation, yes, there's something new, but there's always the element of the old too. You've got both. Yes, exactly. You mentioned that, you know, when you play music, it sort of sounds like you. And that if we look

at artists like Jane Austen or James Joyce or John Lennon or George O'Keefe, you say any creative person we can think of, no matter how prolific, had five or six elements that recombine and interplay in their work and by which we know them. Exactly. We may be doing new improvised art or avant-garde art or whatever you want to call it. But you don't have to be afraid of sounding old because that which is old has influenced you. I often talk about being the origin. The word original is often mistaken to mean doing something that's all new that nobody else has ever thought of in the entire history of the world. But that isn't it. Original means you are the origin.

So, of course, we all took geometry in school. And here on your body, there's the x-axis and the y-axis, and they cross at the origin. And for you as a human being, the origin is right here in your body. And if you have read Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, if you've read Charles Bukowski, whatever avant-garde poet you're interested in, if you've read Beowulf, there's a woman who's... I'm forgetting her name, I just started the book. There's a wonderful new translation of Beowulf that just came out that's really hip and wonderful. Everything that you've read is in you. Everything that you didn't like is in you.

Books that you didn't like, music that you didn't like, you've still imbibed them and you had a bad reaction to them or you criticized them. You read an article by somebody that you disagree with and you walk around the street inwardly reciting your disagreements with that person. Well, that is part of you now. So when you have digested all those influences, they're now in your belly. all those influences so that they're now in your belly. What comes from you is original because you are the origin, including everything that you've learned, everything that you've absorbed, all the skills you have.

So improvising doesn't mean doing something brand new that's never been done before. It means doing something that's really entirely from you and really entirely from your interactions with your partners, all of whom have the same or somewhat different relationships to history and culture and all the things that they've absorbed. So, of course, 5,000-year-old stuff is going to appear in your improvisations. So of course, 5,000-year-old stuff is going to appear in your improvisations. Right, right. Well, I think that is a wonderful place for us to wrap up.

You and I are going to talk a little bit more in the post-show conversation about being stuck or sticky, how we move out of being stuck. And then we're also going to talk a little bit more about this idea of what it means to live life as a verb or to stamp out nouns, what that means more in our lives. And listeners, if you're interested in the post-show conversation, you can get access to all the post-show conversation, ad-free episodes, a weekly episode I do called A Teaching, A Song, and A Poem, and lots of other great things by going to oneufeed.net slash join. Stephen, thank you so much. This has been a really enjoyable conversation and I really enjoyed the book a lot also. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure for me. If what you just heard was helpful to you,

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