BEYOND STRUCTURES
MAY 18, 2011. I did an audio seminar on this a few years back.
We are fascinated with structures and systems because they work, and because some of us feel an aesthetic attraction to them.
They work until you want to do something different.
Like magic.
Magic is non-system.
Which puts it out of the reach of most people.
Because most people want to grab a structure and pull it around them and sit there like a bird in a cage. They want to go from A to B to C and feel the satisfaction of knowing it works every time.
Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong at all.
But go into a corporation and say you want to teach them creativity and they’ll say, “What’s the system?”
Once I told a personnel chief at a big company, “The system is to stand on your head.”
“Literally?” he said.
“No. That would be too easy. People would find a system for that. But figuratively, that’s what you want to get people to do.”
He scratched his head.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s where we start. I say something and you don’t understand. Then we have a chance.”
“What are you?” he said. “Some kind of zen teacher?”
“No,” I said. “If I said I was, you’d pigeonhole me. I teach non-systems.”
He laughed in an uncomfortable way.
“We don’t operate on non-systems here.”
“No, but if you let three or four people do that, they might come up with a product you never dreamed of.”
That he could understand. Vaguely.
Here’s how things work at some very big corporations. The second-tier honchos decide it’s time for a new product. They call in the chief of production and ask him what could be done. He suggests a whiz-it 4, which is basically a whiz-it 3 with a few more bells and whistles.
The honchos give him the green light, and he goes to work. He sets up a structure, which means he basically triggers the structure he already has. He gets underlings to make sketches of whiz 4, and with those he assigns compartmentalized tasks to various departments under him. The timetable is eighteen months.
He appoints a project supervisor to oversee the whole thing.
The project supervisor pretty much knows what’s going to happen. The six departments in charge of bringing in the whiz 4 on time will do okay—except one key department will fail miserably, because three guys in that dept. are lazy bums. They find ways to delay operations. They ask meaningless questions. They let work pile up on their desks. They meddle in other people’s business.
Twelve times, the production supervisor has tried to get these idiots fired. No go.
So everybody settles down to grind of bringing in whiz 4 on time.
Structure.
Manuals, rules and regs.
DMV, IRS. Play it by the book.
This can make magic the way an ant can fly to the moon.
So long ago it was in another life, I taught private school in New York. There were six kids in my class, all boys. I was supposed to teach them math. They were all at different levels. They had no ambition to learn math. No matter what I did, they performed miserably. Add, subtract, multiply, divide, decimals, fractions—it didn’t matter. If they managed to learn something on Monday, they forgot it by Tuesday. It was rather extraordinary.
So I took them to an art museum one morning. They were as lost there as they were in the classroom. But I wasn’t. That was the key. I was already painting in a little studio downtown, and I was on fire.
So I began to talk about the paintings. The Raphael, the Vermeer, the Rembrandt. The De Kooning, the Pollock, the Gorky. I had no plan, no idea. I just talked about what they could see if they looked.
And then we walked back to school and I set them up with paints and paper and brushes and told them to go to work. I said I didn’t care what they painted. Just have a good time. Do something you like.
All of a sudden, they weren’t making trouble. They were painting. No more whining and complaining.
I walked around and watched them go at it. I pointed to this or that area and mentioned what I liked.
There was no way to measure or quantify or systematize what the kids were doing that day, but they were coming alive, out of their sloth and resentment.
Then we got back to math, and it was as if they’d all experienced an upward shift in IQ.
That night, back in my studio, I made a note in my notebook. It went something like this: Give them a non-structure, and then follow that with a structure, it works.
So that was that.
There used to be something in this culture called improvisation. People understood what it was, even if they wouldn’t do it themselves. Now the word has almost vanished. Same with the word spontaneity. The moment when eye, mind, and brush meet canvas. When mind meets the new. When the inventor suddenly gets up from his chair and trots over to his workbench and starts putting pieces together.
The old zen guys called it no-mind. That didn’t mean you were a robot, it meant you had a very sharp mind, actually, but you just transcended it, you skipped through it like a flat stone on water. Structureless.
This becomes magic when imagination jumps into the fray. When the inventive urge takes the foreground.
The trouble with all these Asian spiritual practices now is that they have a long and distinguished history, and the history tends to infiltrate everything that’s happening. It’s venerated. That’s like throwing a heavy wrench into an engine. You need a clean slate, a wide open space. You need Now.
You need Now, which is dry tinder to the spark of imagination.
Levitation now isn’t what it was six or 12 or 20 centuries ago. Magic isn’t a return to the mystical past. Alchemy was what people did in the Middle Ages to give themselves a Now, on which they could inject the flame of their imagination.
It wasn’t a system. Not really.
But if you have enough history at your back and you stand away far enough, everything looks like pattern and structure and system. That’s the illusion. That’s the deception.
Magic doesn’t work that way.
The only problem magic has is: if you create it, who else will see it? That’s the only glitch—and that can be worked with.
You see, systems make people blind. If they can’t fold an event into a structure, then for them it isn’t there. This is very interesting. This is where all the myths of Hermes (aka Mercury) sprang from. He was the figure who flew and passed through walls and had no barriers in the space-time continuum—the tin can we call universe. So people pretended, at a deep level, that they were unable to comprehend him. In a real sense, he was invisible. His response to all this was to become a supreme joker. A trickster. He toppled idols of the hidebound, rule-bound, system-bound society.
If you read the myths of ancient Greece, you begin to see he ranked very high in the pantheon of the gods. There really was no reason he couldn’t be considered the king of the Olympians.
But he didn’t want the throne or the lineage. That was just another system, erected by his god-colleagues, who were bored out of their minds and desperately needed the entertainment and distraction it could provide.
Hermes was deep in the fire of his own imagination and speed and improvisation and spontaneous action.
Magic.
He didn’t need or want metaphysics, cosmology, ultimate truth, illumination, enlightenment, or Oneness and Bliss. He already embodied of all those things and much, much, much more.
The notion of shared, consonant, and structured reality as the final goal became an enormous joke.
The structure and system of life and society, from a certain live perspective, is a joke.
Many marriages become impossible because husband and wife find themselves trapped in a system, and they don’t know what to do. That’s the beginning and end of their problem. If they could move in and out of the system, while remaining married and loyal, they would realize everything is wonderful. It’s a magic trick.
To make it work, you need imagination, which is the thing that allows you to see structure as putty that can be moved around and reshaped at will. Imagination has all the creativity there is, and yet it is non-material, it’s outside the shapes people build to run their lives.
From the point of view of civilization, structure should be a sturdy platform, from which people can take off and create.
When I was 19, people thought I had a few problems, so I was sent to an office in New York to take a Rorschach Test. The specialist opened up a large notebook to a page of inkblots. He was a technician who did one thing in his job. He interpreted what people told him about those inkblots. He had a complex system that enabled him to categorize people according to various subtle shades and types of neuroses.
So he showed me an inkblot and said, “Tell me everything you see in it.”
“Everything?” I said.
“Yes.”
He was a stern neutral android, and he followed his playbook to the letter.
“Okay,” I said.
So 20 minutes later, I was still talking about that first inkblot. I think he had a dozen of those blots in his notebook, and he was supposed to show me every one.
But I was still chirping away on the first one. Birds, animals, planes, kitchen utensils, ancient symbols, articles of clothing, wars, interstellar collisions, underground caves, noses, beaches, leaves, insects, clouds, forests, gnomes, ships, streams, rivers, idols, chewing gum, coins…
I was cheating, of course. Which is to say, I was using my imagination. This was outside the rules, really.
The technician was sweating. He was squirming in his chair. Contemplating how many hours it would take to get through all the inkblots. We’d take a supper break and then come back for more, far into the night.
Finally he said, “That’s enough.”
“But there’s more,” I said.
“No,” he said. “That’s all right.”
He stared at me.
I stared at him.
Standoff at OK Corral.
In his system of universe, you could have two things. Normal and neurotic. I didn’t fit into either slot. He didn’t understand that. So to him, I was invisible.
I thought about my favorite radio show, The Shadow. Lamont Cranston renders himself invisible to the bad guys, and proceeds to torment them.
It was a good day.
JON RAPPOPORT
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