Yo-Yo Ma—the Dalai Lama of Cello
Over the past three weeks I drove through Washington, Oregon and California to do some research for my new novel. While I was in San Francisco I had the good fortune to hear Paul Hindemith’s Cello Concerto (1940) performed by Yo-Yo Ma with the San Francisco Symphony.
As Ma’s fingers worked the cello fret board and strings the air rang with a complexity of sound I’d never heard before. To say that Yo-Yo Ma is a brilliant cellist is common-place. But what struck me was the remarkable aura he emitted during the breaks in his performance when he was not playing a note—the respites when the orchestra carried the music through the transitions that moved the score forward without the soloist.
In these brief interludes Ma sat back in his chair and scanned the musicians, the maestro (Michael Tilson Thomas) and the audience surrounding him. Ma’s face was lit by the forces streaming through him, his knowledge and talent and years of practice and study—all of it compacted in the moment of his performance which was both completely under his control, yet completely controlling every molecule in his being.
Yo-Yo Ma: A Biography (Greenwood
Biographies)
This reciprocal stream of creative energy reminded me
of the current Dalai Lama, a man whose face glows
despite the unending trouble and grief he encounters
day after day. In his case, I suspect he’s sustained
by faith in the unity of the one and the many: the
knowledge that his place in the world is like a
fading rose nourished by forces which will
reinvigorate his mission for generations to come.
Is this the same stream of being that “totally
scared” Yo-Yo Ma—an experience that made him “an
infinitely richer person”? The answer is not as
important to me as the thought that an artist has to
enter a psychological world that is both enlightening
and frightening, energizing and enervating, a vortex
of the one and the many.
Sometimes I’ve been afraid to explore this world, the
places my fictional characters have created. But I
tell myself that I have to look upon their scenes
with unblinking eyes and transmit what I see without
censorship or the slightest filtration.
My greatest fear is that I’m not up to the task. Too
often I turn away, or it seems the language that I
need to convey this meta-reality is beyond my grasp.
The work is too huge, too ambitious for me to render
competently. What sustains me is the idea that there
is no other task worth doing. That, and the
transcendent look on the faces of Yo-Yo Ma and the
Dalai Lama. I would give a lot to wear their faces
for even a few moments.
The Art of Levitation
There are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only Being. — Albert Einstein
When people ask what it’s like to write a novel I often reply that it’s the closest I get to levitation. You can imagine my pleasure when Einstein and Wasson testify to similar experiences. Despite their endorsements, I suspect the subject deserves some elaboration if it’s going to make compelling sense to readers.
Although Wasson and Einstein were contemporaries, they were very different from one another. We all know Einstein as a physicist, or perhaps as an amateur violinist. The lesser-known Wasson was a vice-president at JP Morgan & Co. and a self-taught ethnomycologist who began the study of edible wild mushrooms on his honeymoon (must have been quite a romance!)—a pursuit that led to his personal discovery of magic mushrooms and other hallucinogenic fungi. Despite these differences, both men were accomplished writers.
Wasson and his wife began to travel the world reporting on their experiments with psychedelics and the variety of transcendental experiences associated with spiritual and religious practices. His first-hand reports reveal a sense of wonder at his out-of-body journey, one that provided an elevated view of consciousness.
I’ve never heard reports of Einstein toying with
psychotropic drugs of any kind. Yet I’ve come across
several passages written by him that express a
disembodied awareness similar to Wasson’s accounts.
While he never fully endorsed any religion (he was a
secular Jew), there are hints here and there that he
was a pantheist, one who believes
that God inhabits all things. When I read these
statements from Einstein, I take them literally. I
suspect there were several occasions in which he
possessed a complete identification with
“Being”—free, as he says, from the constraints of
“evolution or destiny.”
Please be assured I’m
making no claims to identify myself with Einstein,
Wasson, or anyone else. However, many artists report
similar phenomena to those of Einstein and Wasson,
especially when their painting or composing or
writing enters a groove when the work seems to create
itself.
Some writers, for example, have revealed that at some
point their characters begin to generate their own
dialogue. I’ve certainly enjoyed this experience—and
much more. In my current work-in-progress (somewhere
around page thirty) I discovered a girl hiding in a
bedroom in her mother’s apartment. I had no idea she
was there, yet when she entered the narrative, she
immediately demanded an important place in the
novel—one so important that it drove the story in a
direction I didn’t imagine when I began to write.
When the creative act reaches this point of
“lift-off” it can become a form of dictation in which
I simply record the text and correct bits and pieces
to ensure it makes sense. Sometimes the force of this
experience is so powerful that I feel as though I’m
almost irrelevant to the process. All I need
to do is trust it as the words appear on the page.
Once that sense of trust is complete, I am free to
read the narrative as a disembodied eye, to witness
the unfolding of the forces of nature as they are
transmitted through my being.
It’s a remarkable experience. Much safer than
psychedelics.
Don't think. Don't write. Just BE.
By becoming attached to names and forms, not realizing that they have no more basis than the activities of the mind itself, error rises and the way to emancipation is blocked. — Buddha
The writer of these lines has nothing whatsoever to teach anyone; his words are just his contribution to our common discussion of what must inevitably be for us the most important subject which could be discussed by sentient beings. — Terence James Stannus Gray (a.k.a. Wei Wu Wei)
When three respected spiritual leaders—each writing from a different tradition—declare that “words,” “thoughts,” and “names” are wrong-headed, it makes me pause. Although they may indeed be correct, I wonder why they impart their wisdom using ... words, thoughts, and names.
It’s taken me some time, but now I can accept the
paradox and the ironies involved. After all, those of
us (and I include myself here) trying to achieve some
insight into the mystery of our existence have to dig
pretty deep to penetrate all the cultural “noise”
that gets in the way. For example, is it possible to
enter a state of self-realization while tapping your
toes to the latest tune from Britney Spears? Or
whilst sipping a single malt whiskey, or digesting
the news about the Japanese tsunami?
Most spiritual guides would say, “No.” The spiritual
journey must be undertaken unplugged—“unplugged,”
that is, in the sense of The Matrix. In
other words, you need to disconnect yourself from all
the cultural personas and social diversions to get to
the centre of life. According to the gurus above,
that includes unplugging the “self” that you’ve
constructed with words, thoughts and names. When
(or if) you achieve this state of pure being
your self will have dissolved, and as a result, there
will be no “you” to experience it.
So, despite claims to the contrary, the relationship
between spiritual awareness and writing is perhaps
stronger than with any other art form. Apart from
various tribal and animistic practices (which DO rely
on painting, sculpture, music and dance) the world’s
great religions depend on the written word to mark
their authority, to provide continuity through time,
and to render a grand narrative that offers
transcendent meaning to their followers.
Furthermore, it seems to me that religion needs
writing more than writing needs religion. There are
so many marvellous poems and novels and plays that
provide a direct conduit to self-awareness (even in
the spiritual sense of the word) and most of them
achieve this success without constructing new
religions from their foundations.
Nonetheless, there are plenty of writers who attach
spiritual value to the act of writing. Several
European Romantic writers and the American
Transcendentalists testify to this bond. In our own
era, many of the American Beats allied their
creativity with the Zen notion of fully inhabiting
the present moment. As Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg
used to say, “First time, best time.” In other words,
artistic intuition is the best guide to artistic
excellence; never edit inspired phrasing into proper
diction.
For me, the daily act of writing is the closest I get
to levitation. It’s a practice I maintain for its own
sake. With that perspective in mind, the pressure to
publish diminishes, and the need to cater to the
public taste and fashion dissolves. Ultimately, this
approach offers a kind of creative freedom. And if
that freedom can be completely unleashed—so that even
unconscious self-censorship is eliminated—then the
novel can dictate its own narrative, the characters
will speak freely, and artistic clairvoyance can
emerge.
In short, the novel can simply BE.