Fighter's Mind, A (31 page)

Peter and I had had a rocky relationship in college. I had been an admirer of his, and he had thoroughly savaged me in my final critique. But the past was past. I was over it, and I was curious to hear what he would say about this line of reasoning. Could talking to artists about how they think possibly be useful?

I finally caught up with Peter in Manhattan, at a café in the East Village. As I walked down the crowded streets to meet him, I reflected on the changes—in the heyday of the New York art scene, the Lower East Side neighborhoods were filled with old tenement buildings where artists hung out with poets (Peter had originally been a beat poet). Now it was the retail version of that, punks with faux-hawks and dirty clothing pushing shining bikes with solid disc wheels that cost two or three grand. I looked around for a real punk who might steal the kid’s bike after stomping his face with a Doc Marten. No luck. Those days are gone from Manhattan. Now the prevailing feeling on the city streets is that everyone is wealthier than you.

Peter showed up much older, still vital, bemused by the changes around him. A refugee from the past, a stone in a whirl-wind, New York was still New York to him. He had a hard time, at first, with the nature of my question. “Is it worthwhile to discuss how artists think?” He parroted my question, frowning. “I don’t know. I
know
when artists work they don’t think. It’s a different setting in the mind . . . the purer the art the less they have to say.”

We talked for a while, but to little effect. We parted amicably and agreed as writers that we should write each other about it. And so we began a correspondence of ideas.

“In each significant case,” he wrote, discussing how artists might talk about how they think, “the answer will be idiosyncratically specific and, to us ordinary mortals, wondrously incomprehensible. It may seem scandalously dopey.

“Our tendency is to THINK, when our only hope is to NOT THINK. We get consumed with wanting to win or to do well and forget just to make the art or hit the ball.

“As a baseball nut, I have this constant fascination with the incredibly complicated task of seeing, assessing, and solidly hitting on exactly the right square inch of a round bat, a ninety-seven-mile-per-hour fastball, over a time span of far less than a second.

“It’s amusing to read Ted Williams on hitting . . . he said he could see the ball compressing against his bat. He said he could smell the bat wood burn.

“I think that when we do a thing right, we feel joy—but an impersonal joy, not belonging to us. An example of personal joy is the joy of winning, which any true master will hold in contempt. Considerations of success or failure don’t enter the mind of a master, when the chips are down.

“Some artist [Peter thought it was maybe Philip Guston] said that when you start to work, every artist you ever cared about is in the studio with you. One by one, they leave. Finally, you leave, too. Then the work happens . . .”

I had a book of Peter’s, a collection of interviews with David Salle, a painter who had become famous in the 1980s with his figurative work, rife with symbols, juxtaposing images from a wide variety of sources. He was a bona fide
famous painter
.

Peter recalled meeting Salle in 1980. “Fascination and suspicion, even fear, attended rumors of his enigmatic work, underground prestige and commercial success . . . I had seen a few of his pictures, with their bluntly drawn erotic and melodramatic images on fields of acrid color, and had been at first jarred then baffled, then increasingly stirred by them. They were like ready-made dreams, as intimate as if I had dreamed them myself, and utterly fresh.”

I had a similar reaction to Salle’s work—
I can paint better than that,
was my first thought. But, like very few paintings, they continue to get more interesting and
beautiful
the longer you examine them. The more you look, the better they appear, and they become transcendent.

With the help of my friend and agent David Kuhn I managed to track down Mr. Salle and spoke with him over the phone. As well as being one of the major figurative painters of his era, he’d designed sets for theater and ballet and had an appreciation for the kinesthetic. He’d even dabbled in boxing and knew the frenetic pace of early sparring sessions.

“What sets painting apart from other kinds of art making is that it’s performative. In the moment, did you do it well? Or not?” he said over the phone from his studio in New York.

That was a shocking statement to me, because it was so obvious, yet I hadn’t considered it. Of course, the athletic stroke of the painter is frozen in time for all eternity to witness. Sure, you can paint over it, but then that new stroke is the one we see, that new gesture. It’s still frozen for all time, the minute you let it alone, the moment it’s considered done. Some painters feverishly rework and repaint the canvas, trying to get it right, but they still have to get it right and then leave it. Just like a video record of a fight—you got knocked out and we can watch it for eternity.

“There’s no such thing as conceptual boxing, or conceptual football. Either you complete the pass or you don’t. Painting is obviously so much more than technique or brushwork . . . whatever it is, whatever mental, spiritual, or emotional thing you’re bringing to bear, it’s all expressed by the point of the brush, the paint left behind. It’s bizarre how specific it is . . . like being a stunt pilot.

“What I try to do is a paradox, by consciously getting outside myself. It’s hard to do with the consciousness, but the best paintings . . . one has a feeling that you don’t know where they came from, they just happen. I always say that students need to get out of their own way.

“We’re living through an intensely mental phase in the history of art. The scales often tip one way or the other, and right now they’ve gone into this extreme mental state and cognitive direction, but it’s not always like this. The way art has been taught in the last thirty years is all about intentionality—and I would say intentionality is overrated.

So there,
I thought with some satisfaction.

“I don’t really give a shit what somebody
thinks
they’re work is about. Students are expected to talk about
intentions,
and I think, Who cares? I don’t even want to know, don’t tell me . . .” Salle trailed off.

 

Schjeldahl had pointed out an article in a recent
New Yorker
called “The Eureka Hunt” by Jonah Lehrer (
The New Yorker,
July 28, 2008). It’s a fascinating essay on the brain science behind insight. The title comes from the shout “Eureka” (Greek for “I have found it”), when you suddenly realize the truth, the solution, and details the scientific pursuit for the location and “source” of insight, chemically and electrically, in the brain.

Mr. Lehrer endeared himself to me right off the bat by using the Mann Gulch fire as his lead-in. Mann Gulch was a famous “tragedy” wildfire in 1949 that killed thirteen smoke jumpers. I was a wild-land firefighter for two seasons, and this was a fire that every firefighter has studied, because it was an example of the first ever “burnout.” A group of sixteen smoke jumpers were hiking along about midslope, flanking a fire on the far side of the valley, on the opposing wall. Then fire got in below them, on their side. Fire below you is death.

If you light a match and hold it with the flaming end up it will burn slowly down the match; fire burns down slowly. If instead you turn the match at a steep angle, with the flaming end down, then it will burn up to your fingers in a few seconds. Fire moves uphill at incredible, explosive speeds, and the smoke and hot gases precede the flames.

The crew was trapped, the fire racing up the slopes through the tall dry brush, pushing a wall of flame toward them. Their only hope was to try and outrun it, get over the top of the hill, a losing race. Men sprint uphill at four or maybe five miles per hour, while fire moves at twenty or more. The steeper the hill, the slower the men and the faster the fire.

Then the foreman, Wag Dodge, had a flash of insight; the finger of God stroked his brain. He lit his
own
fire and lay down in the ashes. He called for his men to join him, but they didn’t understand what he had intuitively known—fire won’t burn where it’s already burned. This was the first intentional burnout, something that would later become standard strategy (of sorts) for firefighters—we’d call it “bringing the black with you.” But Dodge’s men didn’t know him, and didn’t trust him, and couldn’t hear him over the roar. His men ran and thirteen of them died. Wag lived. Norman Maclean wrote a beautiful book about it called
Young Men and Fire
.

Mr. Lehrer’s article was about the cognitive action of insight, about where in the brain the activity took place and what that told us about flashes of genius. He chronicles the scientists mapping the brain first with MRIs, and then with EEGs, hats covered in electrodes.

While test subjects racked their minds for answers, the scientists watched. When insight appears there’s a spike in gamma rhythm; “it’s as if insight had gone incandescent.” And they could trace the activity to a small part of the
right
brain.

The prevailing wisdom is that the left brain is more important, the conscious brain that controls language. The right brain is sometimes seen as minor; it seems more vague and unknown. The right brain is the creative side, which is great but nonessential, as the old clichéd brain science has it. Modern brain science has found that this is overly simplistic. The hemispheres are deeply connected and interdependent. But in terms of insight the old clichés hold water.

Lehrer describes insight as a balancing act: “At first, the brain lavishes the scarce resource of attention on a single problem. But, once the brain is sufficiently focused, the cortex needs to relax in order to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere, which will provide the insight.” Lehrer quotes one of the scientists, who says “that’s why so many insights happen during warm showers”—you have to relax away from your left brain. You have to cast your net wide, over all of your knowledge.

It’s why, as a writer, I keep a notebook by the bed; often in a half-asleep state, my mind will see the connections I’m looking for. You can’t focus too hard. “One of the surprising lessons of this research is that trying to force an insight can actually prevent the insight . . . Concentration comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity.”

This was all reminding me very strongly of a conversation I’d had with Greg Jackson. Sitting one afternoon in Greg’s quiet office, between classes, I asked him about the martial arts from those dark times in human history, “traditional” arts, fighting styles and systems that had been discredited in the MMA ring.

Greg had responded, “Those were created to deal with a certain problem at a certain time and a certain place. It’s not that it doesn’t work. It does work against samurai. These guys weren’t idiots, and it was a tough time. Our stuff is the pinnacle of unarmed personal combat. We’re in the process as it keeps evolving, it’s hyperspecialized. We don’t have to deal with weapons, or arrows, or horseback.”

When you think about it, I’m pretty sure in a battle during the Crusades or in medieval Japan you’d never want to leave your feet—you probably wouldn’t shoot a takedown and work top position surrounded by guys with spears and swords. Leaving your feet would be death.

This was when Greg recommended I read
Zen in the Art of Archery
.

“I use that all the time when I teach,” he said, “but I say it’s
like walking to the door
. When you get up and walk to the door, you don’t think about it, you don’t put this foot in front of that foot and think your way through it. You just walk, without thinking. That’s how fighting should be. The door is a metaphor for your opponent. Don’t think about how you get there, just get there. And when you do that, you do things that are good—you hit somebody with something that you didn’t even know you were going to throw, and he didn’t expect it either because you weren’t thinking about it. That’s when it really happens, what Musashi calls ‘the void.’”

I didn’t get it. Greg laughed; he was aware of the trickiness of the concept.

“You have to be calm enough to get to the void—it’s that weird fucking concept. Here’s my problem with Eastern teaching: they’re talking about experience, but they can’t say experience. For some reason they won’t say it, so they say ‘unlearn what you have learned,’ which you can understand when you’re on the other side of it but what a terrible way to teach it. It’s stupid. Zen’s job is to break that filter down and get you to experience everything, to get that logic filter out of your brain. So I can see why they say it, but it’s much easier if someone told me in Western language because we live in the Western culture. I understand that it’s really cool to say ‘unlearn what you have learned,’ but teach in the culture you’re in.

“So I prefer,
Find that place where you don’t think about putting one foot in front of the other when you go to the door
.”

I thought about my own experience in sparring, and of the right hand. I fight orthodox, which means my left hand is the lead and jabs and my right is the power punch. I could land the jab okay, but whenever I threw the right hand it seemed like it was too late. Because I had to think about it, plan for it. When I started doing drills with Javier I started throwing it all the time, and then in sparring I would just throw it—don’t think about it, just throw it—and lo and behold it was landing.

“That’s why the mental toughness conditioning is important. As you get kicked or hit, and it starts to hurt, it forces you to focus on yourself instead of what you should be thinking about. It breaks you out of the place you want to be in. Not the void.”

That made sense. I asked Greg about the spiritual side of fighting. Did he think there were a lot of things in the traditional martial arts that were good for MMA?