The Exquisite Beauty of Not Knowing
Not Knowing
I was at a pub on Friday, for dinner (pork belly, malbec, baby eggplants, so so so good) and the musicians, two women, were setting up on stage. Everyone in the pub was eating and talking and it was noisy and fun.
At some point, one of the musicians leaned to her mike and began singing an Irish song, a capella, for the sound check. The whole place hushed in the presence of this beautiful voice, completely private moment. Instantly, every one was quiet and still—no silverware clattering, people set down their pints and wine glasses.
She kept singing for a moment while the roadie jiggled dials. She was so completely into singing—she had become completely one with her voice—she didn’t notice at first that she had brought the pub to a standstill. Then she smiled and paused and said, “This isn’t the show, go back to your dinners.” But we were all so moved. We couldn’t jump right back in. She sang a little more, but it wasn’t the same; she was self-conscious now, and so were we. The pure thing had shifted. It was a sound check now.
She hadn’t intended that singing to be public: it was open and spontaneous and real, the real human thing. It was an incredibly intimate moment. When humans began singing, this is how they sang. Though the women were wonderful, blending their voices into one sound, the a capella not-really-doing-it song was the best performance of the evening.
Two of my writing clients this week have written some of their best pages of all. The work is completely fresh and vigorous and pitch-perfect. I called each of them in the middle of the day, mid-reading, to say: “What are you doing! How are you doing this? This is amazing.” Both clients said the same exact thing to me. “Great but I’m not aware. I’m not aware of when it’s good.” They said this as though something was wrong—with them, with the work, with the process, with me. They said this as though they were failing, as though awareness would improve things even more. They said this as a lament: if we don’t know when it’s good, how is this ever really going to be fun or rewarding?
It will not be fun or rewarding (go to pubs with your cutest friends for fun and rewarding). I have been writing for twenty-five years, seriously writing, and I do not know when my work is really good. Sometimes I know crap when I see it but mostly I really don’t know.
It’s just like the woman singing, not-really-singing. Great art is not “the show” –it’s human action perfected in silence. Chuck and Kay wrote this week without the critic, without an audience, without the judges, without me in the room. They each were “just” doing a kind of sound check, not really doing it for real but pouring their soul into it. Not in order for it to be good. Their purpose was practice. Sound check. Part of the reason the new pages were so brilliant was because they weren’t being written in order to be judged. Chuck and Kay and the pub musician were all in touch with the initial urge to utter. The source of beauty.
Because I have face blindness, this profound inability to know for certain if a person is someone I have seen before or not, I’ve had practice, lots of practice, getting comfortable with not knowing. The not-knowing state is key for making art. Most of the great work gets done when in some key way you are not really paying close attention to the product. You are actually attending to something else: your word count, your mother’s way of phrasing her complaint, how happy you were when he showed you those little dance steps. You’re writing, but your mind is elsewhere. There’s a spacey-ness layered onto a profound focus. The most important lesson for the beginning writer to learn is this: notice when you are in that state.
Noticing will ruin it of course, but it’s the only way you can steer yourself back to your creating mind. When you are working well, you never know you are doing it. You don’t know when the work is good. When you are making something beautiful, you are the thing.
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