Of D Minor and Snatches (Arts & Crafts)

As I’ve said many times (and any casual reader of this blog can confirm by perusing through the numerous posts), I normally don’t speak much about my life in here. I write to get better at writing, and when I have lots of writing to do in other venues (like preparing class materials or finishing a book) I can spend multiple months without posting without feeling I am missing on something. Sounds a bit autistic, but that’s how things are. However, today I intend to make an exception, and provide my readers with some data about what I’ve been doing lately in a number of fronts this last couple of years, for reasons that will become apparent es the post progresses. The apparently banal (or self-centered data) I’ll be providing at the beginning will serve (I hope) to put in context some more universal reflections on the nature of art, and the pursuit of the good life (that, consisting in a conscious application of artistic skills, the more difficult to acquire the better, constitutes an art in itself).  

2019 was for me a good reading year. Not stellar, but pretty close. I finished 85 books (a bit more than 7 per month, even if by saying so I risk being labelled as more of a frequency-obsessed guy than with my previous post) and 10 comic books (or graphic novels, although I’m not a great fan of that label), totaling a bit more than 24,000 pages (for an average of 67 pages per day). Not awful, but slightly below what I read in 2018, when I finished reading less books (just 76) but on average much thicker, as I went above 26,000 pages then (topping 70 pages/day, something I hadn’t done since I finished my first university career). I confess that I was a bit pissed by that, as since the birth of my last son, eight years ago, every single year I had managed to read a bit more than the previous one, as taking care of the young one demanded less time (as he became more independent, started attending school, and enjoyed more playing alone, or with his friends, than with his parents). SO, the fact that I had read less in 2019 demanded some introspection to find out what I had been doing that kept me from reading as much as I used to.

First place I looked was physical activity. On the weightlifting front, I continued consolidating my recovery from a semi old injury (tear of biceps tendon) trying not to fall prey of a much older one (replacement of ACL and removal of meniscus of left knee). I kept a fairly high volume of training (moved a bit more than 625 tons in the year, spread in 17 microcycles, which compares favorably with a bit less than 440 tons in 23 MCs in 2018) after leaving, in July 2018, a very Oly-centric training methodology that was really doing nothing for me (it kept me mobile and moderately fit from a cardiovascular perspective, but I was slowly losing peak strength), so in 2019 I ended up doing less microcycles (they went from during roughly a week to being planned for two weeks, allowing for better recovery between sessions) but moving many more kg in each of them. Although my left knee keeps degrading (the unavoidable wear and tear of old age) and losing mobility (apart from being a pain in the ass, aching now almost continuously, and giving me a really hard time after long hikes in the mountains) I have recovered a semi-dece level of base strength, and without breaking any lifelong PR I’ve put up some numbers in the squat, the deadlift, the bench press and the press that don’t compare too unfavorably with said PRs. All of that sounded good, but definitely I couldn’t say I had been devoting more time to training, as I went from training almost every single day to training 3-4 times a week, and just 2-3 when the teaching workload became higher (due to class material preparation or exams correction).

That pointed me to another potential culprit. On 2019 I started teaching the same subject (business ethics and corporate social responsibility) to a new set of students, less mature in theory (undergrads, instead of graduates within a masters degree), but that turned out to be extraordinarily engaged and enthusiastic, and also showed to have a quite solid background (I would say in some areas they could even teach some things to my masters’ students of previous years). However, I considered such different target population required a complete overhaul of the materials I had used in previous years, so I invested an inordinate amount of hours in preparing them, with all that such change entails (changes in exercises, continuous evaluation exams, group exercises and the like). Which was very rewarding, and lots of fun, but didn’t yet provide me with an explanation of why I read less, as it surely didn’t absorb me as much as the writing of a whole book did, which is what I did back when I started teaching this subject (by the way, such book was only published in December of 2019, and yes, proofreading it and making the final adjustments did consume quite a sizable amount of hours), in a year when I also managed to read more than this last one!

So maybe part of the explanation was the teaching load, but, on the other hand, I didn’t start learning a new language in 2019, as I had originally planned when I set out my course of language acquisition in 2015 (the plan back then was to consolidate French between Jan/15 and Sep/16, learn Italian between Sep/16 and Aug/17, learn German between Sep/17 and Aug/19, consolidate Latin between Sep/19 and Aug/20, consolidate classical Greek between Sep/20 and Aug/22, and learn Hebrew between Sep/22 and Aug/24, at which point I would recalibrate and set new goals). So in September of last year I should have started with Latin, but German proved to be a tougher nut to crack than I expected, and although I now read it quite fluently, it’s not as effortless as I wanted it to be, and still require substantial queries at a dictionary to fully grasp the content of either some pieces of news or some specially convoluted books. So I decided to give me some slack, and prorogue my German learning, which should have meant that I ended up reading more pages per day, as in 2019 I read much faster this new language than in 2018, and approximately half of the books I read are in the language I’m in “learning” phase, which means that both in 2018 and in 2019 half the books I’ve read were in German, but in the latter year I could coast through them much faster. As an aside, I’ll probably insert Russian before Latin as the next language I learn “voluntarily” (I may need to give a honest go to Chinese, due to work demands, but I’m not 100% sold on it, I’ll have a clearer picture in a couple months), but decade-long plans are intended to give wide guidelines, to be adjusted as we evolve and mature and adapt to the unexpected vagaries of life.  

However, at that point in my enquiry I had already seen the real culprit of my diminished reading performance. One of the things I wanted to do in my strategic plan for the decade was consolidate my combat skills by learning to box properly (something I could then pass onto my children, as I’ve recommended any reader of this blog to do repeatedly, to better prepare them for the more likely than not societal collapse in the coming 50 years, which I will probably not see, but they very well may). But, I’m ashamed to recognize to my attentive readership, that is something still in my “to do” list (towards the end of this year I may reconsider giving it a try), as after clearing my schedule in May last year to start searching for a convenient time and place to start boxing (the place I had already scouted, near my current job) I had kind of a bout of inspiration, went to a couple of music academies, and signed up for guitar lessons.

Now, anybody who has known me for just a couple of minutes would attest that I may well be the person less endowed with musical talent in the whole world (slightly paraphrasing David Hume, I’ve thought many times about myself and musical abilities something similar to what he thought of his cousin, Lord Kames, and arrogance: “when you say of someone he is the most arrogant person in the whole world, you normally only mean he is very arrogant, except when you say it of my Lord Kames, in which case it is the exact enunciation of the unvarnished truth”; in my case “when you say of somebody he is the most devoid of musical talent in the whole world you normally only mean he has no ear for tune and a limited sense of rhythm, except when you say it of the Vintage Rocker, in which case it is the mere truth”). Be it as it may, I’ve also enunciated many times (some of them in this same blog) that one of the measures of a life well lived is continuously striving to do difficult things, to master areas of practice that require conscientious application of our abilities, be they mental or physical; that take ourselves outside of our areas of comfort, and force us to experience again the agony and the frustration of being piss poor at what we do, and to have to struggle against things that a five-year-old does without much effort or attention. Seen in retrospective, I couldn’t think an activity that fit that bill better than me learning to play a music instrument.

I have to recognize that I probably underestimated the level of commitment that such endeavor would demand. In my original plan of learning to box competently, I assumed that 1 hour a week in class, plus some tweaks to my usual training routine (which is already optimized to keep me as explosively strong as possible at my age) would be enough. Not so with playing the guitar. The half hour I spend in class is but a minimal fraction of it, as if I really want to progress, I have to devote much more than that practicing at home. Between half an hour and one hour a day. Which I cannot detract from work (although I was freed from my responsibilities in the subsidiary of our company that builds thermal Hw for satellites, thanks God, as if it were not for that I wouldn’t have been able to do much outside of working like crazy, as I had been doing in previous years), and I can only partially detract from strength training (as I do not devote that many hours a week to that particular pursuit), so the time for doing my scales, and my following of a remorseless metronome with very basic rhythm patterns, and my occasional toying with some simple lick or other, had necessarily to come from reading.

Which is all well and good, and a price I’m more than willing to pay. I wouldn’t be entirely disingenuous if I said I’m loving every minute of learning to play the guitar… but I wouldn’t be far from the truth, either, as it is indeed a most enjoyable activity. And it’s already giving me enormously valuable insights into what art consists of (more about that in a moment), into the way the human mind works, and into the plasticity and adaptability of the brain. Specially when I compare my learning journey with that of my middle son, who started a few months before myself (and was one of the main sources of inspiration for me deciding that I wanted to do this). He “gets” complex rhythm patterns in seconds, and is able to replay riffs and long sequences of notes and chords with just a few repetitions after seeing other people play them (by just looking at their fingers running along the fretboard), while I need to see them written down in a tab, attempt to memorize them, then clumsily try to reproduce it continuously looking at the tab, the hand in the frets, the hand that strums, and sometimes the infinite in front of my, exasperated by how complex and challenging the whole thing is.

So if I think how far I still am from stop being an “absolute noob” and start being an “advanced novice” I may despair. Which I do not, because I think instead of how far I already am from “has never in his life touched an electric guitar” (which is where I was just seven months ago), and I’m nothing short of utterly amazed. My small advances may look laughable to any intermediate player (I can play three or four simple riffs, keep the rhythm and the tempo of another three or four famous tunes, still with a lot of interruptions and failed chords and missed beats), but are huge to me because, frankly, I never thought I could get this far. And I see better things coming my way in the future, just by sticking with it. As in weightlifting, perseverance, in most cases, trumps innate talent. And I may be distinctly short on the latter, but few people can beat me in the former (and, anyway, this is not a contest, I have absolutely no gripe with 90% of the population of Earth being better guitar players than me… as long as at some point I can play Johnny B. Goode, Sweet Home Alabama, Only Daddy that will walk the line and Summertime Blues I’ll be happy as a clam and more than satisfied).

Finally, let’s get to the deepest lessons I’m learning, fulfilling the (implicit) promise I made in the title of this post. The first thing that drew my attention in this process of learning an entirely new ability was how similar it felt to learning how to lift weights. It is a very physical activity, where you have to let the body deal with the little details as autonomously as possible, without having to pay conscious attention to every minute move, because consciousness is flexible (which you don’t need much, as you are doing repetitive, strictly patterned tasks) but slow, and you need to be distinctively fast both to lift well and to play well. Which is a nice illustration of Daniel Kahnemann theory of mind’s two systems, one “fast” (automatic, unconscious, based on quick heuristic rules, that feels effortless) and one “slow” (that engages our consciousness and attentiveness at the price of taking much more time to accomplish whatever it is directing us to do). But of course, to be able to delegate tasks to the “fast” system you need to train like crazy. When I started playing, I didn’t know (by heart) the position of a single note in the fretboard, much less where the fingers had to be to play chords. So before I played notes or chords I had to look at my hand, look at the fretboard, and slowly try to put each finger in turn where it had to go, then tentatively strum the string (or set of strings), which may require another look to the strumming hand, and usually find that the note was not right, the chord didn’t sound harmonious at all, and required some adjustment (move some fingers a few millimeters up, or down, or right or left). Needless to say, that took forever (a few seconds for barre chords), and such limitation on speed made the playing of any identifiable melody nigh impossible.

But, again, it felt oddly familiar, because it was not that different from learning to clean and jerk, where you first learn how to position the body under the bar in different moments of the lift (starting position, power position, receiving position of the clean, power position again with the bar on delts, receiving position of the jerk), and then practice how to go from one position to the next in the most efficient and fluid manner, and finally to start increasing the load on the bar whilst letting the body “do its thing” and keep the speed or even increase it (there are no “slow” movements in weightlifting). And to let the body do such moves reliably and solidly and producing the expected results you had to rely on countless repetitions, until the whole motor pattern becomes ingrained, and you could do it in your sleep (indeed, I found years ago that a good training method was to complete the Oly lifts blindfolded, I may reconsider doing that one of these days), and stop paying attention to the little details (“Are my shoulders sufficiently in front of the bar? Are my hips rising at the same speed as the shoulders? Am I extending enough the hips and knees at the end of this second pull, and thus should I start changing direction to get under the bar?”) and focus on the big picture, as if seen from the outside. You stop living each individual lift in the present tense, and start considering them once completed as a finished whole, that may require some adjustment in the next iteration (so when you crouch to grab the bar again you may say to yourself one or two cues, like “remember to finish the pull” if, after the last pull you have judged that indeed, you didn’t extend your hips and knees enough… something that you were unable to notice, and even less to correct, in the midst of doing it).

There is even an equivalent to the difference between the powerlifting moves (squat, bench press, deadlift) and the weightlifting ones (snatch and C&J). The powerlifting moves are like individual notes, where you just put one finger over one string in one fret, and strum that single string. You then put another finger over another string (in the same or other fret), and strum that other string, and so on. Thus, playing a scale is like completing a set. You try to play the scale faster, as you try to complete the set with more kg on the bar. Jeez, come to think about it, when I play I increase the bpm in my metronome in neat jumps of 10, as when I warm-up I increase the load on the bar by increments of 10 kg. When I approach the bar for a powerlifting move, I know in advance if I will complete the set (which I do 99.9% of the time, as I program conservatively), as there is no real “technical” difficulty involved. The moves are slow enough to allow for minimal adjustments of form during their execution, and they don’t really require the “fast” system to be in command. You can complete them as consciously as you want. Similarly, when I start a scale, unless I’m attempting a new speed, I’m pretty confident I’m going to complete it (almost faultlessly), as each single movement of the fingers is pretty short and easy, and can be kept under the control of the conscious mind. I have to go to really insane (for me, be somewhat indulgent here!) speeds to really have to rely on the “fast” system taking over, as it becomes impossible for the “slow” one to keep pace.

But of course, although most riffs and some melodies are just successions of notes, individual notes are like words in a poem, while chords are the verses that really define a lot of what they can express (starting, unsurprisingly, by the internal rhythm and cadence of the whole poem). And chords are an entirely different beast from notes. There is really no way you can consciously think where each finger goes and then setting them carefully in the fretboard before strumming the strings. You just put the hand the best you can, all at once, and there you go, and just pray it wasn’t too far off. And, if you have practiced enough, it normally isn’t, so instead of a dissonant jangle that offends even the most uneducated ear what you obtain most time (amazing as it still seems to me!) is a heavenly, melodious, harmonic tone full of resonance and grace and suggestive, like a good gulp of craft beer, with its aftertaste, its main notes accompanied in the right proportion by the secondary ones that enhance and underline it, making the whole experience even more intense and satisfying. Quite similar to what you feel when you complete a demanding snatch, in which every muscle has started contracting exactly in the right sequence, so the whole body moves through space in the most efficient manner to put the barbell overhead in a seemingly effortless flow, with each limb, like each note, underlining and enhancing the effort of the trunk to position itself stably under the load, so it can triumphantly rise it in a glorious sign of mastery and domination of mind over brute matter.

The most interesting element of the analogy, though, has to do with what it reveals about art itself, and the way to both produce and enjoy it. Artistry in guitar playing has a lot of additional components beyond just getting your chords to sound right, but it absolutely ride on getting that absolutely nailed. You can add color, and chromatism, and texture, and sub-rhythms and whatnot to your basic chords… once you have absolutely mastered them. And within that mastery there is always an element of uncertainty. You really are not sure, every time you move the hand on the fretboard, that you are going to get it right, because you have “outsourced” the execution of each chord playing to the fast system, to the subconscious mind (there is no way you could play artistically if you wanted to keep full conscious control of the position of the hand in each chord). So to reach the highest point of artistic expression (in order to be able to focus on the most sublime consequences of the action), to really let the spirit (or the deepest levels of the mind, or of the brain, I’m not taking sides in the whole monism vs. dualism argument here) you have to pay the price of renouncing a certain level of control, of delegating a certain level of the execution… to forsake a bit of your freedom (understood as the opportunity to judge and consciously decide how you take each step) and suffer, unavoidably, a considerable level of uncertainty. Even the most seasoned performer is nervous before walking into the stage, because she is not sure (and, furthermore, she cannot be sure!) of how things are going to turn out, if, regardless of how many hours she has practiced it in advance, she may not forget some element, or have a misstep, and end up delivering a very poor performance. Even the most seasoned lifter, doesn’t matter how many top-level competitions he has been through, is nervous before walking on the platform to confront the barbell, because he is not sure (and, furthermore, he cannot be sure!) if he is going to successfully complete the lift. I’m not saying with this that Olympic weightlifting is as artistic as music (although it is my opinion that it is, indeed, much more artistic than a lot of what passes for music nowadays), or that it has a similar social worth (however that is measured), or allows for a similar expression of the depths and powers and wonders of the human condition.

What I’m saying is that creating art, attempting to express the hitherto unexpressed, in addition to require a certain mastery of some mechanical skills that are foundational for each type of art, requires the assumption of certain risk, is just not amenable to the mere application of a predefined formula, needs to go beyond the application of those repetitive, quantifiable, consciously controllable skills. The writer that embarks in a great novel (not a piece of genre that just ticks all the right boxes to satisfy the public) is, when he starts writing, mostly unaware of how the final work is going to look like. He has a very vague idea of what he wants to accomplish, but he throws himself into the act of writing like a weightlifter throws himself into the act of lifting, knowing he will not be able, to a great extent, to consciously control where the writing process, where the work, are going to take him, to be sure of what the final result is going to look like (remember, furthermore, he cannot be sure!). He should have put on the time to master the “mechanical” elements of his craft: how to transcribe a dialogue between hos characters, how to describe the physical environment where the action takes place, how to give a lively impression of the feelings and emotions of the participants. If he is not solid enough at those (each one of which can be done carefully and conscientiously, are “craft” more than “art”) the final result will be clunky, disjointed, will not flow graciously, and will ultimately fail. But it well may happen that he is a master of the craft, but ends up producing a very subpar work, not very inspired, with a feeble structure, maybe because he attempted to play it safe and constrained himself to just weave those elements he was most sure about, not taking the risk to completely lose himself in the narration, and let it take him where it may. Like a guitar player that is competent in his handwork, can meet the right notes at the right time but is somewhat lacking “spirit”, lacking “inventiveness”, lacking “feeling”. Again, not taking the risk to take the melody to wherever it may, pushing the application of each unit to its emotional extreme. Like a very strong man doing a “somewhat power clean & press” (and lifting, slowly and under control, a very respectable amount of weight, way more than I for one will ever lift) for lack of… adventurousness? to really throw himself under the moving weight and be uncertain of how or if it may end up in the right place.

So there you are, I now understand better not just how to weightlift (I approach my snatches and C&Js like chords, to be played first competently, and then, God willing, sublimely), but how to write, or to paint, or to draw… or to live a good life, although that may require some additional explanation that I leave for another post.