Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 17

Gary Player in a Sand Trap

Do you know who Gary Player is? He was one of the “Big Three,” along with Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, in professional golf in the sixties and seventies. He won nine majors, including the Masters three times. 

Gary Player

My Aunt Peggy and Uncle Charlie were staying at a golf resort in Florida. As they were heading to the first tee one morning, they passed a sand trap in the practice area. Gary Player had planted himself in this bunker with a huge bag of balls.

He was practicing.

From the sweat stains on his shirt, it looked like he’d been in there for a couple of hours.    

Charlie and Peg teed off on their round. The course was crowded and play was slow; it took my aunt and uncle five hours to finish. When they walked off the eighteenth green, they passed the same sand trap where they had seen Gary Player in the morning. 

Player was still there practicing.

Art is work.

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The Cosmic Radio Station

I believe that the Fifth Symphony existed before Beethoven composed it. Maybe not note for note, but in some form that we would recognize if we could hear it.

The work existed on another plane of reality—the plane of potentiality.

Composers (who knows how many?) sat at their pianos and searched the aether for these divine measures. But only one found the frequency. Only Beethoven tuned in to the Cosmic Radio Station.

Beethoven brought the Fifth Symphony from the Plane of Potentiality to the Material Plane. His genius brought it into form, so you and I could hear it.

That’s work.

That’s the artist’s work.

Tuning in to the Cosmic Radio Station, illustration by Victor Juhasz

P.S. This illustration is from an upcoming book, “THE DAILY PRESSFIELD.” More info to come as the date approaches (probably next year sometime.)

P.P.S. For our Roundtable Regulars on the Comments section (and those of us who love to read their brilliant back-and-forths) … that’s all still there in this new format. Just click on the COMMENT ON THIS POST button below.

P.P.P.S. In my demented mind, the Cosmic Radio Station is not some fanciful notion. I believe that some broadcast-like, frequency-based modality operates in much the same way as WLS in Chicago used to, when you could pick up its 50,000-watt channel on the AM radio in your Cadillac as you cruised across West Texas at three in the morning. We–the human race, that is–just haven’t developed the technology yet to tap into this Mystic Vibration. How fortunate for us that we all, and not just Beethoven, have that receiver built from birth into our own heads (or hearts.)

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Rick Rubin’s Source

I was fortunate enough, a few months ago, to get a sneak look at an upcoming book called The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. Do you know who Rick is? He’s been called the Godfather of Hip-Hop. His recording studio, Shangri-La in Southern California, is and has been a mecca for everybody from the Beastie Boys to LL Cool J, to Run DMC, Public Enemy and many more.

Rick Rubin

Rick is a great believer in inspiration.

He calls it “Source.”

Rick’s book was a mind-blower for me because his view of Source is that it’s omnipresent. Like the trade winds, Source is a global, non-stop, open-all-night atmospheric phenomenon. Seeking Source is not like searching for a truffle in the woods, where you have to sniff out the one tiny, elusive germ of brilliance. Source is everywhere, Rick believes. And everyone is tapped into it.

Rick is famous for bringing a band into his Shangri-la studios to write and record an album. He doesn’t interfere or offer musical ideas. Instead he facilitates. His contribution, like that of a great movie director, is to create an environment of safety and freedom in which the artists can be as bold and crazy (or nasty) as they want to be. Take risks. Swing for the seats. Work in ways you’ve never tried before.

Trust Source.

Rick will appear in the studio like a barefoot Obi Wan-Kenobi and suggest to his guys that they write their next song backwards, or in another language, or in ten minutes with no revisions. Then he’ll leave and no one will know where he went or when he’s coming back.

If you ask Rick what his job is, he’ll say, “Serving Source.”

Rosanne Cash likes to say that a songwriter has to travel everywhere with a catcher’s mitt. Ideas for tunes and albums are constantly zinging through the atmosphere. “I’ve gotta catch ’em,” Rose says, “before they wind up with Lucinda Williams.”

Source.

The Cosmic Radio Station.

The Muse.

They’re real. And they’re sensational.

P.S. Today is our first beta-version of a new way of delivering these Writing Wednesday posts—directly, without an intervening “Click here to read the post” link. Whaddaya think? Like it? Hate it? Does the white-text-on-black-background work for you? How can we make it better? Thanks for any comments. Be brutally honest!

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The Long Game

[Quick update: next week, the Wednesday post will arrive in your inbox in a slightly different manner. I will say no more! Hope you like it. Lemme know in the Comments.]

Who are we? As our works pile up, we begin to see. The contours of our gift are becoming clearer to us. 

The Bluest Eye

Sula

Song of Solomon

Tar Baby

Recitatif

Beloved

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993

Jazz

Paradise

Memoirs

Love

A Mercy

Burn This Book

Home

God Help the Child

Race

The Source of Self-Regard

The Measure of Our Lives

 We realize we have a subject. 

We realize we have a theme. We have a point of view. We have an obsession. We have an artistic identity. 

The simple act of working over time, like Toni Morrison, has revealed that which we did not know when we first set out.

It has revealed who we are.

The post The Long Game first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

A Dime a Dozen

Geniuses are a dime a dozen. The streets of Manhattan are crawling with MFAs from Columbia and NYU, as are the freeways of LA with grads of the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

 I’ll trade them all for someone who knows how to work.

The original cover of “Do the Work,” published by Seth Godin’s Domino Project

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“Talent is B.S.”

The following passage comes from The Knowledge. The speaker is a version of myself, when I was driving a cab in New York City and struggling to learn the writing craft.

I have a literary agent. His name is Martin Fabrikant. Marty is ninety-six years old. That’s not a typo. Marty is Dutch. He speaks with an accent. He’s about four-foot-ten and likes to joke that he used to be six-four…

Marty is a death camp survivor. He’s got the tattoo. He never speaks about the experience directly (I only know through my friend Pablo, who originally introduced me to Marty) but he’ll make remarks from time to time whose gist is, “Appreciate life. Never complain. Work hard and do your best.”

Marty has one other mantra: “Talent is bullshit.”

“I’ve seen a million writers with talent. It means nothing. You need guts, you need stick-to-it-iveness. It’s work, you gotta work, do the freaking work. That’s why you’re gonna make it, son. You work. No one can take that away from you.

“And I’ll tell you something else,” Marty says to me now over the phone. “Appreciate these days. These days when you’re broke and struggling, they’re the best days of your life. You’re gonna break through, my boy. And when you do, you’ll look back on this time and think this is when I was really an artist, when everything was pure and I had nothing but the dream and the work. Enjoy it now. Pay attention. These are the good days. Be grateful for them.”

I really did have an agent who really was (or seemed to me at the time) ninety-six. He was actually in his seventies. His name was Barthold Fles. He represented Kurt Weill, Anaïs Nin, and even Carl Jung. Know what he said about talent? 

 The exact same thing Marty said.

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What is “Real?”

A writer (or a singer or dancer or songwriter or filmmaker) searches for his or her voice. Hemingway. Quentin Tarantino. Beyonce. But what is voice? And what makes it “real?”

There’s an exercise, a guided meditation that a friend might take you through.

Meryl Streep in “The Deer Hunter”

It starts with the question, “Who are you?” You’re lying down, eyes closed, relaxed. Your friend asks you, “Are you your name?” Silently (or maybe with a nod) you answer, “No.”

Your friend says, “Release it.” 

And you release your name. That’s not who you are.

The exercise continues through, “Are you the place where you live, i.e. a Texan, an Irishwoman?” and on through nationality, gender, age. 

You release these too.

Are you your personal history? Your family? Your sexual orientation? Your traumas? Your joys? Your dreams?

            No.

            Release them.

            Are you your body?

            No. 

            Are you your religion?

            No.

At each juncture, when you think deeply and answer with absolute honesty, you find yourself saying no. “No, I’m not this. No, I’m not that.”

You release each one.

Meryl Streep in “Silkwood”

Yet “you” remain.  

Where do you wind up finally? For me, I was floating in space, without a body, without a name, without a country or a family. I wasn’t even an Earthling. 

What was I?

What remained, for me, was a consciousness. That hadn’t altered. I was a consciousness that saw things through a very specific lens. My sense of humor remained. My curiosity remained. My specific, idiosyncratic appreciation of beauty and awareness and intellectual expression remained.

What form did that consciousness take?

For me, it was a vibration. I was a frequency. I could almost see it, like a wave on an oscilloscope. 

In “The Bridges of Madison County”

That frequency was unique to me, as every other being’s frequency was unique to it.

            Now, said my friend who was guiding me through this exercise, “You’re floating in space. Can you hear the cosmic Om? The sound vibration that undergirds all creation?”

            I could.

            “Okay,” he said. “Now make your vibration harmonize with that sound.”

That’s the voice. That’s the answer to “Who are you?”

An actress over the course of her career may play dozens of roles. In each she’ll be different. Meryl Streep as Linda in The Deer Hunter, as Karen Silkwood in Silkwood, as Francesca in The Bridges of Madison County, as Karen Blxen in Out of Africa. Each role is different, each “voice” is unique. Yet in each the actress remains the same, doesn’t she?

Ms. Streep is being true to something. But what? How can it be “true” if it changes from role to role (and even evolves as her chronological age advances?)

In “Out of Africa”

If we were viewing this from a Buddhist perspective, we might say that Meryl Streep the actress actually has no personal identity. Personal identity, we might declare, is an illusion. The actress is adapting role-to-role and assuming the personality of the character she is playing.

But that wouldn’t be true, would it? There IS an identity that is Meryl Streep, even Meryl-Streep-the-chameleon-actress who adapts to each new professional challenge.

A case could be made that those individuals who stand out in their professional or spiritual fields (and whom you and I can’t help but admire) are those who have found that vibration that is unique to them … and who operate out of it exclusively.

Think of a singer. A quarterback. A writer. The great ones sing and play and compose out of an epicenter, a consciousness, a point of view, don’t they? A unique epicenter and consciousness and point of view that is theirs and no one else’s.

Is that artifice?

The way Edith Piaf sings. Or Yo-Yo Ma plays. Or Bob Dylan writes.

I will make a yes/no case. 

Yes, it’s artifice in that it has risen into awareness and the artist, recognizing it the way a hunter recognizes a bird on the wing, has seized upon it and made it his or her signature.

But no, it’s not artifice in the sense of being artificial. There was a moment, I would suggest, when that voice rose out of Edith Piaf like a cry out of a she-wolf. Without intention or artifice or contrivance.

I would venture further that that moment was one of agony and surrender and self-annihilation (in the best sense), perhaps heartbreaking, perhaps ecstatic. We’ll never know. Edith herself may not have known.

No one has said it better than Henry Miller:

I didn’t dare to think of anything then except the “facts.” To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn’t become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from the very roots of your being.

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The River

The passage that follows is from a book I’m working on right now. I’m not sure the passage works for a Writing Wednesdays post, but what the hell, I like it and my instinct tells me to put it out there.

The passage is part of a section about a twenty-two month period in my late twenties when I lived by myself in a little house in Northern California and did nothing all day but read and write. I’ve alluded to this time in The War of Art and a couple of other books.

I lived on a street called River Road then. There was a real river (not a big one, but one with real water that really flowed) across the street from the house I lived in. Anyway, here’s the passage:

A postcard-type shot of the river, where it reached the sea. My section was a little less dramatic than this.

As I write this now, almost two generations have passed. Yet the weeks and months of that time remain vivid to me. Nothing in my life before or since has penetrated me like those two years. In our society we erect altars to love. Songs, movies, even TV commercials tell us love is the answer. 

I don’t believe it. 

I believe in a different kind of love. I can’t define it except to say that it has nothing to do with the flesh, nor is it particularly personal. The goddess is real. Her stream flows inside you and me like an underground river. 

That river is our life, our real life. 

During those two years I lived beside that river. Nothing came between me and it. Each morning I entered the river, and I didn’t come out until I was so exhausted I could no longer swim or stand. 

No one had told me about this river. No teacher had instructed me on it. No mentor had pointed me in its direction. I had tried before to enter this river, but I could never find the opening. Not like this time. Not like now. Was I producing anything of value? Not yet. That would come, if it ever did, years and decades in the future. But I was in the river and the river was in me. 

The price of entrance to the river is work. Work is the toll of admission. The river can’t turn you away as long as you’re willing to pay. Paul would tell me that, and Bart too, and what they said was true. If you’re willing to pay the freight, the river has to let you in. That’s the law.

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The Willing Embrace of Chaos

What is the first virtue of the artist?

It is—and must be—an awareness of and acceptance of the primary reality of the field upon which she will work.

That reality is chaos.

“Nothing in war,” declared the great Israeli general, Moshe Dayan, “happens in a straight line.”

Moshe Dayan with Arab sheikhs, 1967

Nothing in art or entrepreneurship happens in a straight line either.

The birth of anything—stars and galaxies as well as people and animals—takes place amid disorder, confusion, and chaos. That’s our novel, our nonprofit, our Korean vegan restaurant.   

You are I must teach ourselves to be comfortable working in darkness and in crooked lines.

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“You have to be a studio”

I was doing a free rewrite a few years ago on the lot at Paramount when a producer friend spotted me on the bungalow’s porch and plopped down in the chair beside me. She asked me what I was working on beside this freebie. 

I hesitated.

“That can’t happen,” she said at once.

The gate at Paramount studios

“What do you mean?”

“You not being ready when someone asks that question. You have to have a slate.”

“A slate?”

“Look around,” my friend said, indicating the soundstages and production offices that extended in every direction. “Every studio has a slate. Fox, Disney, Warners…they’ve all got a lineup of pictures they’re making and more in the pipeline. Every producer on this lot has a slate, and every producer and actor and director on every other lot has a slate. I have a slate. You have to have one too.”

My friend was a serious player. She had had hits at two different studios and was in production on another picture at a third. 

“Think about who we’re competing against in this town. It’s not just other writers. We’re competing with studios. We have to have the same professional attitude they have—about finances, about contingencies, about material. 

“You’re a writer. At all times you have to have at least three finished scripts and half a dozen in the works. In a meeting, when a producer says, ‘Steve, what else have you got?’ you have to be able to rattle off four, five, six projects—and be able to pitch ’em all with full professionalism.”

My friend was late for a meeting; she had to hurry off. But what she said as she left is still burned into my brain.

“Just because we’re ‘creative’ doesn’t mean we have permission to act like idiots. The reason writers are condescended to in this town and treated like children is because they act like children. Those days are over. We are entrepreneurs. We are in business. We’re competing against multi-billion-dollar enterprises, and we have to be just as professional as they are.”

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