Well, we have a new Eno this week, it's the first week, yes, everybody remembers Jordan who used to be the Eno and he got so good at making announcements that now he's going to be the vice president for fundraising and development. So Ninan is taking over for him. And today there doesn't seem to be as many people as usual, must be that people heard, somehow got the idea that I was going to give a long, boring lecture today, which is true. I don't know how they knew that because I didn't tell anybody, I was going to let you know in the beginning, but somehow they psychically realized. How many people here have never heard me speak before?

[01:14]

Yeah, a lot of people, always a lot of new people. Well, so I'll mention that once in a while I don't give a regular Dharma talk and instead I present an essay that I've written, which is usually long and boring because since it's written to be read, it's more dense. So that's what I'm going to do this morning, so relax, enjoy yourselves. If you miss some of it, don't worry, it's not that important, just follow your breath and should a word or two penetrate, that's nice. And if not, like I say, just enjoy being present. So, the title of my essay is, Do You Want to Make Something Out of It?

[02:17]

Do You Want to Make Something Out of It? Zen Meditation and the Aesthetic Impulse. So I know that we have some artists in the audience and those people will maybe appreciate this, but hopefully it will be of benefit to the rest of you a little bit too. So Do You Want to Make Something Out of It? Alan Ginsberg begins his essay entitled, Meditation and Poetics, with this paragraph. It's an old tradition, this is Alan talking, it's an old tradition in the West among great poets that poetry is rarely thought of as just poetry. Real poetry practitioners are practitioners of mind awareness or practitioners of reality, expressing their fascination with the phenomenal universe and trying to penetrate to the heart of it. Poetics isn't mere picturesque dilettantism or egotistical expressionism for craven motives,

[03:26]

grasping for sensation and flattery. Great sentence, huh? Classical poetry is a process or experiment, a probe into the nature of reality and the nature of the mind. So that's what Alan says about poetry. And then the poet Phil Whelan says a similar thing in a poem where he, I didn't look it up, but I remember something like he says, I don't want to be just another pretty poety boo, I want to be a world, he says. This is making a very similar point in another way. So for me, this sense of making poetry, or I would say it goes for any art, as a heroic and grandiose undertaking whose cost and goal is everything sounds just about right, providing

[04:31]

that you don't get too excited about it, seeing it as anything more or less than any human being is doing or would do if he or she reflected for a few minutes about what is a worthwhile and reasonable way to spend a human life. So, number one, art isn't just another job, it's an endless exploration and as with any exploration there are proliferating avenues of pursuit and no final successes. And number two, art is a necessity for humans and we all need to find a way to participate in it. The reason we need art so desperately, I would say, is that the world and we ourselves persist in being made and there is something exhausting and troublesome in the madeness of the world

[05:33]

and in the madeness of ourselves. What is made always has the quality of limitation or unsatisfactoriness. Madeness captures us into a vicious cycle of desiring more madeness or better madeness and all the madeness we get only makes us want to make improvements or additions. So, art making is an anti-making. It's an anti-making because art is making what is essentially totally useless. That's what makes it art, that it's useless. It doesn't do anything, that it's something inherently unmade and this is the source of the liveliness of art. Any piece of art stares us in the face with the fact of its being what it is uselessly. It is a record of a person's commitment to the confrontation with the made, a confrontation

[06:44]

one is bound to come away from second best and yet one does it and reaches a peak of exaltation in the doing of it and the artwork facing the viewer or hearer is a phenomenal testament to that useless confrontation which by virtue of its supreme failure calls our life into question. If you really look at a piece of art or hear a piece of music or poetry or see a dance, you walk away wondering about your life and this is what these art objects are supposed to do. This is why artists make such enormous sacrifices in the doing of what they do because this doing is the undoing, at least temporarily, of what has done them in, in their lives and would do them in to the point of death or madness if it weren't undone once in a while

[07:47]

in the process of making art and all you artists in the audience know what I'm talking about. One of the qualities of artworks that has impressed me the most over the years is the fact that artworks have a tremendously unstable nature. The artwork is its physical presence, the dancer or the paint or the words of the poem, the notes of the music and yet at the same time it isn't exactly that. If you are hit in the face by a plank, for instance, you will definitely be hit by the plank and you will feel the effects of it no matter whether you believe in planks or not and no matter whether you are in the mood for the sensation of pain or not, you will feel it anyway. But if you make an effort to experience an artwork, you may not experience anything at

[08:52]

all. You may look at it and it may strike you as meaningless, you know, a meaningless hunk of this or that, hardly worth the effort or the $10.95 for the ticket. Or one day you might look at it and it might strike you as profoundly moving and the next day you might look at it and it might seem like, what did I see yesterday that was so important? This is ridiculous. Imagine a great painting which is sent from one gallery to another for a show. Of all the people that will come into contact with that painting, movers, curators, technicians who hang the work, security guards and the perhaps thousands and thousands of people who will file by to see it, of all these people, all these hours of people contact,

[09:58]

only a very few, very, very few will actually experience this piece of canvas and paint as a work of art. And as I say, even those few might come back later and not see it again when they came the second time or even if they could see it the second time and they could explain what it was they saw, they would really be only talking about a memory. The actual experiencing of the painting as a work of art will occupy only a few seconds or minutes in the hours and hours and hours and hours of human contact with the work. In other words, what I'm saying is that actual experience of art is extremely rare and it's fleeting and it's unstable. The poet Paul Valéry said of poetry, and the same would be true of art I think, that

[11:01]

it is completely irregular, he says, completely irregular, inconstant, involuntary and fragile and that we lose it as we find it by accident. To me, it is a fantastic thing that people place such enormous value on something like this, something so evanescent that we are actually hard pressed to say whether it actually exists or not. I suppose you could say that we value art to some extent just out of a habit, you know, centuries, everybody thinks art's important so we agree. But another reason I'm sure we value it is because art has a very strong aspect of non-art which is to say, like anything else, it can become bought and sold and we respect things that are worth money. And it's worth as much money as anything, probably even more, more so because some art

[12:02]

is even more subject to sudden economic inflation than a software or gene splicing stock. So we really respect, you know, wow, this painting is worth half a million dollars at the auction, you know, two million dollars, 4.4 million dollars, so we respect that. But at bottom, regardless of all this, there remains the mystery of the supreme uselessness of art, of the shifting and unmade quality of it, and of the tremendous need that we all have for the unmade and the undone, no matter how unstable or accidental our experience of it may be. This is a precious experience and I think we all recognize this even though it's rare, maybe some of us have never had that experience, or if so, only for a few moments in our lives. So now I would like to go a little further in considering what this experience of the unmadeness of an artwork might be.

[13:04]

In ordinary waking life, we do make clear and hard and fast distinctions between different things, and this distinction making is of the essence in perception and thought. All day long we have perception and thought, piling up one thing on top of the other until there is a great weight of them, and we define ourselves in the same way among or within our perceptions and thoughts, and we get buried in the process. Life is very practical and very weighty, and there's a great deal of the conflict in life that comes from the bumping into each other of the various perceptions and thoughts which cannot occupy the same space at the same time. So there are decisions and considerations, there's a great desire for organization, yet there's always less organization all the time because as soon as the world is organized,

[14:11]

along comes another one, and then it gets disorganized immediately. And then we have the need to make something else to counteract what has just been made, and I think we all feel the weight of this pulling us down. I have a persistent thought that the problem of being human is always more or less the same in different historical periods, but it is tempting to imagine that in our current historical period, all of what I've been saying is more true than it seems to have been in the past. There seems to be simply more going on, more piling up, more distinction, more differentiation, more cry for organization of things that will not be organized. The work of art, by contrast, is organized and therefore peaceful.

[15:13]

There may not be on the surface of it seemingly so much organization, but in our experiencing it, in our appreciating it, if we are fortunate enough to be in the situation of having such an accident befall us for a few moments, we feel how organized, how radically organized is the artwork. An artistic form is the expression of this sort of organization that is essentially an unpiling, a taking apart of the distinctions that make up our lives. The work unpiles things and undoes us in the process. That's why the question comes up. We become undone, so we wonder, who are we? What are we doing here? This is a question that is essentially an undoing of us question because we can never

[16:20]

answer that question. So it keeps us fresh and it allows our life to fully enter itself. So what do I mean exactly by organization? Well, I suppose I mean organization as a feeling of connection or inclusion or completion, a feeling of that that we get beyond thought. In the light of the experience of the work of art, the world makes sense because it is no longer made up of weighty and disparate parts. It is a world of nuance and shimmer and connection. What I would say we call beauty is that, though the word beauty has come to mean pretty. I don't think it really means pretty.

[17:22]

It's that accidental sensation before we have a chance to think about it and therefore make something out of it. That sensation of connection, unmadeness, uselessness, perfection, freedom. Again, Valerie says, speaking of experience of poetry, but again I think it stands for any kind of art. I recognize it in myself by this, that all possible objects of the ordinary world, external or internal, beings, events, feelings and actions, while keeping their usual appearance are suddenly placed in an indefinable but wonderfully fitting relationship with the modes of our general sensibility. That is to say that these well-known things and beings, or rather the ideas that represent them, somehow change in value.

[18:23]

They attract one another. They are connected in ways quite different from the ordinary. They become, if you will permit the expression, musicalized. That's nice, huh? Musicalized, resonant, harmonically related. So what Valerie is describing here is a trance-like state almost that is more real to us when we experience it than the real world that we live in every day. It is a state that is oddly brought on by formal arrangements of ordinary stuff in such a way as to discreate the ordinary stuff, take it apart, which is so startling when we actually notice it, that we can become literally entranced. The Jesuit poet, the great English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, once hypnotized a duck with nothing but a white chalk line drawn on a black table.

[19:25]

He held the duck down on the table and put the duck's head so that it could watch the chalk line. And then he lifted his hand and the duck didn't move. And he wrote about this, he said, in his journals. They explain that the bird, keeping the abiding offscape of the hand pressing her neck, fancies she is still held down and cannot lift her head as long as she looks at the chalk line, which she associates with the power that holds her down. This duck lifted her head at once when I put it down on the table without chalk. But this explanation seems inadequate. It is most likely the fascinating in-stress of the straight white stroke that hypnotized the duck, Hopkins said. In-stress is a term that Hopkins coined to refer to the potentially torqued nature of

[20:31]

anything in this world, purely perceived without definition and weight. And he considered in-stress to be evidence of the existence of God. That you saw in the world around you, in-stress, things appeared just as they were and this was absolute proof to him of God. So his idea was that in this case the duck was mesmerized not by becoming habituated to the hold of the hand on her neck, but by virtue of her utter fascination with the chalk line as such. So for us, art is that chalk line. It points to the in-stress, to use Hopkins' term, of each thing in our perceptual world. I said a moment ago that the experience of art is an experience of connection and I said

[21:32]

beyond thought. And the curiosity of this is that the experience as a human experience can't take place anywhere else but in thought or perception. And this is exactly why it's so hard to pin down what an artwork actually is. And it is in its un-pin-downable nature, which is always the case, but lately more appreciated and examined than before, that probably accounts for the history of art in the century, in our century, our awareness of this nature of art. And it's been the job of this century, I would think, I think in terms of art making and thinking about art, to point out directly and baldly that doubt and accident lies at the heart of what art has always been. And in pointing this out and in thinking about this, one comes very close to the boundary

[22:35]

between art and life, and the boundary itself becomes very cloudy. The word art, the word life, these words become quite indistinct, quite imprecise. One could substitute for both of them simply the word reality, as Ginsburg says, or simply being. That the job of all art or living is to appreciate and authenticate what is, our life simply as it appears, to serve as a reminder, as instance or exemplar of that. And Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian literary theorist who wrote at the beginning of this century, said a very famous one-liner, which is, To make a stone stony, that is the purpose of art.

[23:40]

So why don't we experience a stone as stony anyway? Why do we persistently forget to come alive to the world as it is, right in front of our faces all the time? Why do we have to go to all this trouble of making art so that we can return to where we are and have been all along? And I think it's because of the way that thought works in us. To be present in the midst of our being what we are is a pure sensation that we can never exactly apprehend. And it is, as I was saying about an artwork, the sensation of actually being alive now is fleeting and ungraspable. And thought is always coming along a second afterward, telling us something about it, singing a song of the past. Thought certainly includes the aroma of our being alive, of the feeling of our being alive.

[24:52]

But it also includes so much more that is made, so much of doing and piling up that it tempts us necessarily away from ourselves. To find within our thought and perception, for perception is already thought, a settled, free and unmade place takes real effort. And this is the effort of art. Again, to quote Valery, these quotes are from a terrific essay he wrote many years ago called Poetry and Abstract Thought. He says in there, there is no other definition of the present except sensation. Sensation itself, which includes perhaps the impulse to action that could modify that sensation. On the other hand, whatever is properly thought, image, sentiment, is always in some way a production of absent things. Memory is the substance of all thought. Thought is, in short, the activity that causes what does not exist to come alive in us.

[25:59]

Between voice and thought, between thought and voice, between presence and absence, oscillates the poetic pendulum. So I confess that all that I've been saying here is, I guess, a Zen perspective on art. Although, those of you who know me know that I have a very strong resistance to the idea of a Zen perspective on anything, for reasons that probably are obvious anyway from what I've said so far. So take these words, Zen perspective, with a grain of salt, and understand them as just shorthand for a way of looking at the world that is undefined. Of course, we can't get away with that. One always has to be someplace, and one always will have to be called by some name.

[27:00]

So we will always have to use terms, somehow, in the hope that we will always remain willing to have our terms deconstructed right before our eyes, and to find their deconstruction amenable. In the practice of Zen meditation, we are not trying to do anything other than to undo everything, and simply be present as directly as possible with all phenomena that arise. This necessarily involves a moment-by-moment letting go of definition, perception, and thought. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't mean that we are trying to attempt to become stupid, blank-minded, and unthinking, as if we would try to imitate a stone or a blade of grass. This would be, of course, impossible,

[28:04]

and it's not what we're trying to do in any case. Rather, we would try to let the world come and go, including thought, as it naturally does, without trying to stop it at some arbitrary point of our own conscious or unconscious making, and say, this is the world, which, of course, is what we do all the time. And this is what causes us to make a world up, pile it up, as I have said, very high, until it becomes quite shaky, and we become the victims. Of that shaky pile that will eventually fall on our head. In Zen meditation, by contrast, we happily enter a radically simple, even an absurd situation, just sitting there, breathing.

[29:09]

And we have the possibility of seeing how this troublesome pile up of a world is made. And although we may not be able to do anything at all with this meditation practice, it does serve as a kind of training, in a way, helping us, by dint of sheer familiarity, to become directly used to the actual situation that prevails, more or less, all the time, within being. Meditation practice is a return, over and over again, on every moment, to that particularly odd situation, which we can see, as time goes on, exists in the middle of any situation, no matter how simple or complex. Zen Master Dogen wrote a very important text called Genjo Koan, which I translate as

[30:13]

Koan of the Present Moment. In this text, he kindly extends the notion of Koan, or, as we all know in Zen, Koan is a fundamental kind of meditation object. He extends the notion of Koan to our simply being within the present moment of our lives, as Koan. A classical Zen Koan presents us with an insoluble problem. The only way to extend ourselves into that problem completely is to stop trying to solve it. In other words, to stop trying to make something out of it, and simply to allow it to be fully what it is, which would mean, necessarily, that we would take it so personally that it would become our entire life. This is the Zen Koan. In Genjo Koan, Dogen's text, he points out that we do not need to take on some old saying of the masters

[31:15]

in order to confront directly the issue at hand. In fact, each moment of our lives, if we would let go of our definitions and protections and elisions, and lean fully into every moment of our lives, each moment begs that question, what is to be done? What is this moment? After all, what is our life, after all? So here's a passage from Genjo Koan that I'm sure many of you have heard before, a very famous passage, probably the most quoted saying of Zen Master Dogen. To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be confirmed by all things. This confirmation is the dropping off of body and mind of one's self and of all others. It is enlightenment that dissolves all its own traces.

[32:16]

And this tracelessness goes on and on endlessly. So to study Buddhism is to study the self. This means that one looks deeply and honestly at all points at the way in which one's life actually does unfold. Not at the way in which we would think it should unfold or project that it's unfolding, but actually the way our life really unfolds. One looks, is aware of it, fully enters it, fully allows it to be so. And this is always interesting. And it always provides a path forward in our life. No matter what it is that our life is presenting. That anything should arise at all is already a tremendous miracle. Whether what is arising is something we like or not. So there is no judgment or resistance necessary.

[33:19]

And even when there is judgment or resistance, there is a settling into that with appreciation and awe. To study the self is to forget the self means that once you practice in the way that I've just been saying, your definitions and hedges against yourself fall away. And you can be perfectly happy going on with your life, simply living, without any need to make anything out of it. To forget the self is to be confirmed by all things. Allowing things to be as they are without any protection is to appreciate, always, the materials at hand. In everyday living, as in art making, which might not be so different actually,

[34:22]

there is a sense of form and presence, always, in each and everything that comes forward in the present moment. In the Zen tradition, we have a form for walking and standing and sitting and bowing and so forth. And this extends to everything. There is a way of handling a pot, a way of greeting a friend, a way of looking at a cloud, to allow those things to come forward. Dropping body and mind of self in others. This sounds very Zen and foreboding, but I don't think it's as drastic as it sounds. I think it just expresses the freedom that one would feel in the renunciation of everything, in letting everything go that comes. Being willing to accept what comes now and let it go

[35:25]

without any need to hold on to life now or in the future. And in living that way, to see that everything and everyone shares in this way of life already. And the last line, enlightenment dissolves its traces and the tracelessness goes on endlessly. This sense of life, as anything distinctive, as anything different from anything else, dissolves. It doesn't look like anything. It doesn't feel like anything special. There is the sense that in the useless and unmade space and time of actual living, there is a subtle, endlessness and namelessness that is delightfully available to everyone all the time. So, I take this vision of life that Dogen is speaking of here

[36:27]

to be also descriptive and similar to the process of art-making. Anyway, the idea that I have of art-making, which I guess is basically a religious sense of it, and I don't want to conflate art and religion and say they're the same thing. They're not the same thing. And yet I suppose I have to admit that it is inescapable that I am saying that what we call the aesthetic impulse is at bottom pretty much the same as what I would call the religious impulse. And certainly the history of Zen, the cultural history of Zen, particularly in Japan, would attest to the close relationship between these two activities. It's one reason why I think a lot of people are interested in Zen, because it has that sense of the aesthetic impulse at the bottom of it. Insofar as both art and religious practice

[37:28]

always have to manifest in the world as we know it, and in particular things, both art practice and religious practice have serious problems. Religion will always solidify into doctrinaire narrow-mindedness or institutional power-brokering, or both, probably. And art will solidify into money if it's successful, and despair if not. Either way, a defeat. And I don't think I'm the first person to point out that art in our radically mercantile society is more or less doomed to become commodified. Generally, in America and in Europe and probably a lot of other places,

[38:29]

art is made for the wealthy, and it becomes for the wealthy a kind of sanitized, an enriched currency, a fancy dollar bill, you know. Even artists who do not make economically valuable artwork have to create economically classy explanations for their useless artwork, so that they can get grants. Because the cost of making art is very high and one has to pay for it somehow. Even the poor poets, who only need about $10 worth of materials to make their artworks also, are fighting with one another for these same paltry dollars so that they can survive. Despite this, however, I mean this is realistic,

[39:30]

but nevertheless, I don't think the situation is hopeless at all. Because I believe that if the artist can be clear within himself or herself about the nature of what it is that she's doing, and one has to actively work at being clear about it, for clarity is never a given. It needs to be revised constantly, and there are many forces that would confuse us. But if the artist is clear about what she's doing, just as if the religious practitioner, who is any one of us, can be clear about what we are doing, I really do think that it is possible, despite the realities, to proceed with liveliness and integrity. Life well and seriously lived has never been without these difficulties.

[40:32]

It's part of the fun. And anyway, it's a given in this situation. And a certain amount of complaining is probably normal and healthy, but it would certainly be counterproductive to give oneself over to complaining entirely, as I often do myself. So I will close with a final quote from Valery. He says, The mind is terribly variable, deceptive and self-deceiving, fertile in insoluble problems and illusory solutions. How could a remarkable work emerge from this chaos, if this chaos that contains everything did not also contain some serious chance to know oneself

[41:35]

and to choose within oneself whatever is worth taking from each moment and using carefully? And then, a short poem of Dogen. Being as it is. What's that? In a water drop, shaken from a duck's beak, an image of the moon. You've been very patient with all this. Thank you very much for listening. May our intention equally penetrate every being and place with the true merit of Buddha's way.

[42:37]

We are numberless. I bow to you. Time of the morning. If there are any of you who are unfamiliar with it, this is a discussion, dialogue, conversation, and it doesn't necessarily have to be about what I brought up this morning, although it certainly can be. So, what would anybody like to bring up this morning? Yes. Oh, how are you doing? Good. And you? Good. Somehow, I mean, I think it does have to do with what you're talking about, but it's kind of unrelated. It's about mindfulness, having this difficulty where trying to practice mindfulness of, you know, watching my breath, noticing the sensations of breathing, without it feeling like I'm trying to get somewhere, you know, like get to some place

[43:40]

where I feel calm or where I feel like trying to get to mindfulness. If you have any words about how to practice mindfulness without trying to feel like, without this feeling that I'm trying to get somewhere. So he's asking about the practice of mindfulness and that he notices that as he tries to practice awareness, mindfulness, he notices a persistent feeling of trying to get somewhere, get something out of it, and that this stands in the way of his practicing mindfulness. Is that fair? Yeah. Well, join the club. This is not unusual. This is what happens, you know, when you try to practice mindfulness. You become much more aware of the grasping quality of the mind. I want this to be a certain way. This is the problem.

[44:42]

So, of course, it's adding insult to injury to feel that way and then feel like, and now I want to get rid of that. Right? So what you have to do is just pay attention to that. And when you see yourself feeling, I'm mindful and I want to get something out of it and I shouldn't be wanting to get anything out of it, and it should be different, just notice that that is what is arising in your mind and don't believe in it. Don't believe that it should be different. Believe that when you have a thought that it should be different, that this is a thought that you're having. But you don't have to. That thought. So you have to kind of train yourself. In a way, there's a certain amount of, I suppose, thoughtful yoga involved in practicing mindfulness, dropping, every moment dropping, [...]

[45:43]

and just being with what arises, even one's own crazy habits that one can see very clearly are counterproductive. So that's the paradox, you know, of practice, right? The paradox is that you wouldn't practice if you didn't want to improve, right? If you didn't find life uncomfortable and you wanted to find it more comfortable, that's mostly why people practice. And yet, the very finding of life uncomfortable is the problem and why life is uncomfortable. So that's the paradox. You have to just be with that feeling and train yourself to let it come and let it go like everything else does. All our problems, you know, every moment is already taken care of because it's gone. So there's no problem except that we persistently hook on to every moment and make another problem fresh the next moment. So with that faith, just watch what occurs

[46:45]

and be honest. It's very important to be honest with yourself, you know, and see what's truly there, but then let it go. And so after a while, you just, exactly the same thing that you're experiencing now that you've talked about, exactly that same thing is a problem if you say, Oh God, this is awful. And it's not a problem if you say, What a funny fellow am I? You know? And it's true. It's just a funny kind of thing and it's all right. It's just that the strength of your grasping, your mindfulness practice diminishes and you can enjoy yourself more and be a little calmer. So little by little, that's what Isen always said, little by little. Little by little. Yeah, Susan? I didn't really understand what you meant by the word made. Can you say more about that?

[47:48]

Well, when you ask that question, it kind of assumes that I know what I'm talking about and I have something behind what I'm saying, which is not really true. So all I can do now is like, as if I were you, try to interpret that. Because I didn't really have anything in mind other than what it sounded like. But I would say, try to interpret that, that something made is something that's put together, right? It's put together in a particular way. I'll make something out of this. You know, the feeling, the difference between saying, well, this is just there, and feeling, I'm going to make something out of this. You know, there's a sense of getting in there and doing something with it. So that's what the made is. The world is a made world because we make something out of it. And that's the title. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, no, no, what I meant, I think, was our need

[48:54]

to add something to it. Yeah, that's what I meant. Something like that. Yeah? Yes, which is part of the same thing. Yeah, judgment. Yeah. Yeah, right. Judgment, definition, discrimination, that's too fixed. You know, right. I meant that too. Yeah, all of that. Yeah, I mean, there was one famous Zen master named Banke, whose teaching was, he called it the teaching of the unborn. You know, he kept saying, everything is already unborn, unmade, undone, as it is. And that's what he repeated this over and over again his whole life. And he was famous for that teaching. And it was just the opposite of the made, what's made. Although I wasn't thinking of Banke at the time, but now I remember that he taught that. I want to thank you very much for your talk.

[49:56]

I've spent a good part of my life practicing the art of dance. And I still do, some of you may have seen today. But very often it seems to me I'm kind of, I have nothing to do with it. I wonder. I did it because I loved it, and because somehow I felt I had to. But I reached a point in my life and I have memories, basically, of someone who did it. I continue my practice, but I never actually understood why I did it. And this idea of being, well I always knew it was useless. I didn't care to do that. But it kind of helped redeem, it helped redeem my life a little bit. Oh, that's nice, yeah. I understand the value. No, that's nice. Yeah. Yeah, when you were talking, it reminded me, there's a great book that I read years ago by Henry Miller, and I can't remember the title of it,

[50:57]

but once Henry Miller went on a journey across America, I think maybe it was when he had lived abroad for many, many years, and then he came back to live in America, and I think when he came back he traveled all over the country. And I don't know how he did this, but he kept, I don't know whether it was by accident or whether he sought these people out, but he kept, he would go to visit all these people who were artists of various kinds, doing various kinds of things, but all of them were completely unknown. Nobody knew what they were doing, and they just did it. And the whole book is a series of portraits of all these people who he depicted as tremendous heroes and heroines, and I was always impressed with that. It really moved me because just the idea that one does something and one continues to do it for the joy of it and for the nourishment that it gives one without any, just to do it,

[52:00]

any recognition or anything like that. Dancing is difficult, though, because I know of several dancers who, you know, usually at a certain point you can't dance anymore because of the demand, physical demands. But I'm surprised, actually, that no dancers have figured out how to get around that, because I'm sure that one can get around it, like by doing sensory awareness or something like that, which is probably, you could say, a way of dancing when the body, whatever state the body is in, like Charlotte Silver, who's 97 years old, and if she were a dancer, forget about it, because she can barely walk, but she can move her body and experience and have a sense of beauty within the body, so some dancer should figure that out. Yeah, do they? Yeah, he just does it. Yeah, he does it according to his… That would be interesting to see.

[53:00]

Did you really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't quite realize that. Well, that would be fascinating to see. Yeah, you just compensate for it. You don't try to be 20 or something. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that would be a great thing for the art of dance. So there's always a way, I think, to continue the activity for its own sake, just for nothing, for absolutely nothing. And it is a wonderful thing. Nobody will practice an art or a craft. It doesn't make any difference, you know what I mean, in a way, because even something that's a useful craft, insofar as it has the aspect of art in it, it's also useless, right? And one of the things that I think is very good about Zen practice is that Zen practice makes the point, as I was making today in a tangential way, that all activity

[54:01]

can be understood in that way. You know, walking, standing, cooking, eating, any movement can be understood in that way, and that's what's so wonderful, I think, about Zen practice, is that feeling that we could live like that. Yeah. So, anyway, I'm delighted that you could have some benefit out of what I said. That's great. I was supposed to show you. That's a word. What's a word? Say a few words, you know. What's it worth? So, that's great. Mm-hmm. Yes, art that is successful, that you can make money from, that's when you get recognition. Yes. And very often the way I know is that artists are not defined, no matter how talented they are, unless, in my own mind, not like most of the world, unless they get paid for it, they get recognition. Right, yeah, of course. Yeah. So, which is a problem, too,

[55:05]

right, for the artist. I mean, I would think that, you know, once you start getting paid for something, it changes it. I would think... I never got paid for... I mean, I write poetry and I've written for a long time and I never made any money out of it, which I've always appreciated. And I've been paranoid about the idea of making any money out of it. You know, I never particularly wanted to, you know, so I can't really speak from the perspective of somebody who has made a lot of money out of their art, but I would think that it would create a problem because on the one hand, you get rewarded for something you do and you think, aha, I'm on the right track. And so, the good part about that is you think, oh good, I'm getting encouragement now to go deeper with this track. But the bad side would be I'm getting encouragement to repeat myself over and over and over and over again and I'd better not try anything new because goodness knows if I do this, this is not what, my name now is my income source and if I do something that's outside the range

[56:06]

of what I'm supposed to do, then my income might go down and so that's bad, so I better, even if you don't think that, the tendency to do what's successful, of course, is very strong in any of us and I think that a lot of artists do, naturally, you know, repeat themselves and do the same thing over and over again. That can be fine if it's wholehearted and it can be a drag if it loses its life and I think that does happen to artists sometimes. So, you know, there's always a problem. If you make a lot of money at your art, that's a problem. If you don't, that's a big problem too. better have a day job. That's always been my theory. It was my day job. Yeah. In the back, yeah. Uh huh. Yeah.

[57:09]

Yeah, I've said in the beginning the confrontation with the maid is always a spectacular failure. Yeah. Yeah, I was talking to someone who's writing a book and struggling, you know, and I said to her, you know, well, don't worry that much because whatever you say is wrong anyway and that's true. You know what I mean? Whatever you say is always not quite right. Are you going to say something that's right, that's true? Not really, you know. Not really. It's going to be true to some extent and wrong to some extent. Somebody argues and then, oh, they're right, you know, that's true. So, in other words, everything that we do is going to fail to be the total expression that we felt in the doing of it. So, I think it really helps to know that. And my friend who was writing the book when I told her that, afterwards, she wrote me a note and she said, boy, I'm having a much easier time now because it takes the pressure off. To me, you know, there's a whole different, a whole lot of different approaches to art. I mean, I understand. For me,

[58:21]

I like to do what I do, my art, because I find it always enjoyable and uplifting, always. I mean, there might be an occasional moment of, oh God, you know. But I've avoided doing all the parts of my art that are troublesome. So, now I've got it down to like real pure, you know, like I write poems, most of which I never type or edit. And those that I type and edit, I almost never send to publications or any of that stuff which is so troublesome and annoying, you know, writing letters and blah, blah, blah and all this. I very seldom do any of that. I just write the poems. So, I get all the goodies and I don't have to do all the drudge work. Some people view art as a struggle, you know, constantly work and it's difficult and they suffer. And I mean, that's a valid way of doing it. But to me, just the joy of the attempt which one knows at the beginning will fail.

[59:24]

To me, there's something inherently noble and wonderful about that. So, yeah. Part of what I'm thinking about is the way in which we think about what art even is. Yeah. Because I've had the experience of living with people who are indigenous to the land. Their way of being in community has to do with an obligation to the generations that follow them. Yes. And their way of doing that includes poetry, story, dance and perhaps making them an object. Right. And the relationship that I have with that is that that was always how I felt when I was a child. It was just what I did to be where I was. Right.

[60:24]

And that I think often there's this standard of a cultural relationship with what it is we do that adds to it and takes away from it. And I feel that polarity a lot. Yeah. Yeah. No, I know what you mean. Yeah. Exactly. That's what I was going to say. Yeah. She's bringing up the whole issue of she has, I know, a long relationship with communities in Alaska that are fairly close to their indigenous impulse. And it's pointing out the differences between how it is there and our Western idea of art. And of course, you're right, it's quite different. I was just writing about this the other day that you know,

[61:26]

our sort of several hundred years of scientific culture is all about dividing things up. You know, art is different from religion and art and religion are different from science and science is different from psychology. But these kinds of distinctions in a thousand years ago didn't apply. There was just life. You know, art is a very phony kind of thing to make up, you know. It's just that there's life and there's an inherently aesthetic approach to life in many cultures, which doesn't need to be called aesthetic or distinguished from anything else. It's just that's how life is. And we've lost that because we've divided everything up into departments so that it's possible for a Western person to have nothing to do with art or aesthetics at all and live in our society whereas in other cultures everyone was participant in that like you say, just in the way of life. And I was I sort of thinked out yesterday on going down to that Gary

[62:27]

Did you go yesterday to the Gary Snyder event at Stanford? Yeah, there was a big thing out there and one of the focal points of the discussion which I didn't attend but I got the thing in the mail said that something like it was quoting some guy who's let me get this right some guy who's like an activist for the rivers and he's like really well trained in hydrology and all this stuff and he said that I've gotten really good at making good rational arguments against building dams and trashing rivers on scientific basis. He said, until we recognize that arguments for good ecological practices have to be essentially aesthetic arguments until we recognize that the aesthetic argument is the most compelling argument we will never be able to stop doing that stuff because to argue it on scientific terms only goes so far. So the whole

[63:28]

focus, there was many people there yesterday discussing Gary's poem Mountains and Rivers without end and the focal point for the discussion was the meeting of the aesthetic point of view and the ecological point of view as really one point of view. But that's just a tiny thing where two disparate fields in western thought can be seen to coalesce for a good purpose but in a sane life all those things are just one thing it's just there's no such thing as religion either there's just life. Here's how people live this is how people live people have always lived this way this is how they live they do this they do this they do this this is it we don't have to carve the world up into different departments but you know if you want to have a university and all that you have to have different departments somebody has to have their PhD in this and not that. Yeah that's at the basis of that. Yeah

[64:31]

Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah I know I know Oh absolutely sure Yeah Yeah and they were made to feel can you hear her comments from the back what she's saying she was saying that indigenous peoples were told at the height of you know this sort of intoxication that we all had with our western point of view they were told that they were doing it wrong somehow they were primitive or they were not and so and so for many generations were taught and they themselves I think many people internalized a sense of not being doing it right but now that's changing now and I think that indigenous peoples are now seen

[65:31]

by most of the world I think we all understand now that their way of life is a treasure which nevertheless is endangered anyway because and this is the trick you know one of my sons is involved in this kind of work and it's very interesting because now it's real obvious that the world the social conditions to allow any people anywhere on the globe to be isolated and be on their own are gone there's no way anywhere that there's not enormous contact with the whole world so the trick now is how can indigenous people take that on rather than be victims of it because they will be victims of it if they don't get up and say ok we're going to take this on and here's how we're going to manage this our contact with the rest of the world so as to preserve what's best in us now whether or not they can do that I don't know but they're the only ones who can figure that out and I think a lot of a lot of people are taking that on when I went in 1993

[66:31]

to the world parliament of religions in Chicago I was really impressed there was a lot of Native American people there and there were a lot of young people who all went to law school I think there's actually a government program that enables Native peoples to go to law school free somehow why law school I don't know but not I think law school a lot of them so a lot of them were very well educated and were very self-consciously taking on that job so it'll be interesting to see what happens yeah Carolina oh you were oh good yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah [...]

[67:41]

yeah yeah yeah yeah Yeah, I promised I would be there and everything, and I just kind of like didn't go. Yeah, I know, I planned, I mean, I got in a big fight with my wife over it because I kept saying, I'm going, I'm not going, I'm going, I'm not going, and it was one of those days, you know. Yeah, I know. I know, they're circumambulating, I know, I know, I really wanted to do that today. They're circumambulating Mount Tam, you know, Gary has this special way of circumambulating Mount Tam where certain places you stop and you chant this, and then somewhere else you

[68:43]

stop and you chant that, and they go all day long around the mountain and they end up at the Muir Woods parking lot at some point, and I was very regretful that I couldn't, I would have definitely blown off the talk to do it, but I have to do a memorial service this afternoon that I could not blow off, so anyway. Yeah, that's happening today, thanks. Well, they started at 8 in the morning, it's 14 miles, right, so it's an all-day thing. Yeah, it's a big thing. Yeah, once we did a thing like that where we did a similar thing, we walked from Spirit Rock to here several years ago, and it's surprising how hard it is to walk these mountains, because there's a lot of up and down. I was thinking, oh, you know, Spirit Rock to here, pfft, I didn't even put on my hiking boots, so I thought it would be, you know, I got back, I had the worst case of blisters I ever had in my entire life, because you go as much up and down on Mount Tam as you

[69:43]

go anywhere, you know, I sort of forgot that. Yeah. Hi, J.D. I want to thank you for your talk, too, I don't think I can comment on it, it was so dense. It was pretty dense, yeah, I know. Yeah, yeah. But it was very moving to me, thank you, it was incredible to be able to say the truth. Oh, that's very sweet of you. Yakety yak, I have the gift of gab. It's true. Genetic. Speaking of chanting, I've been chanting the Heart Sutra lately as a drill. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't really know anything about it, I'm just doing it, I bought Prerna Han's book today. Yeah, yeah. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about it. Oh, well. I mean, not, I don't know, like a whole talk. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I'll tell you, I was just visiting my friend and colleague, Fu, you know, who lives at Green Gold Share, went to her house yesterday, because it used to be

[70:46]

our house. So, whenever we live in a house, we move out and they improve it considerably. So, I wanted to see how it looked, much better than when we lived there. Anyway, she was in there studying madly away for her class on the Heart Sutra. So, if I were you, I would see if you could get them to, maybe they make tapes of the class, ask the officer, call her, and you could get the tapes of her. Fu, yeah, you know Fu, right? Yeah. So, get the tapes of the class, because to study the Heart Sutra is a detailed kind of thing. One way of looking at it is that I'm always talking about the Heart Sutra. Today I was talking about the Heart Sutra, right? You could say that what I was talking about today is that the aesthetic impulse is to see the emptiness of all phenomena. That's what it means to be unmade, is to see the emptiness of things. And that's what the Heart Sutra is talking about. But, to really study the Heart Sutra properly, the Heart Sutra is like a piece of shorthand.

[71:50]

The Heart Sutra is a list, it's basically a list of every major teaching in Buddhism, which the Heart Sutra then denies its reality. So the Heart Sutra says, here's what it says in Buddhism, A, B, C, D, E, and just lists, doesn't explain it, just lists it all. And then it says, this is not real, this is not real, this, this, this, this. It denies it all. That's what the Heart Sutra is. So, in order to really study it, then you have to go through and understand what all those teachings are, and then understand what the Heart Sutra is saying when it denies the fundamental reality of all those teachings in existence. So, it's a big, kind of a big study. But basically it amounts to what I was saying, that everything, and what I always say, there's nothing else to say, right? That everything is fundamentally quiet, unmade, already awakened, already liberated.

[72:51]

We think that it's separate, weighty, hard and fast, distinct, different. We make ourselves miserable, beating ourselves over the head with something that is basically a feather. The Heart Sutra points out, this is a feather. Take note. That's basically the point, but it's very good to study the detail of it. So, maybe you can get the tapes, that would be good. But Thich Nhat Hanh's book is actually quite good. It's one of the most, there's also a number of other books that have detailed explanations of all the words of the Heart Sutra. You can look in the bookstore, there's a number of other good books. But Thich Nhat Hanh's book is a really good, kind of general, very poetic explanation of the main point of it. Yeah. So I'm glad you're studying the Heart Sutra. It's a good thing to do. Let's see, let me, I want to see if there's somebody who hasn't spoken, then I'll get back to you. Yeah, in the back. Yeah. I really appreciate it. You said that, I don't know if it's good or not, but I think you just said it wrong.

[73:54]

And I would like a chance like that. I deal with, you know, a family situation, like a great set of people, a ton of people. They always tell you that what you're doing is wrong. Yeah. And that you're, you know, I feel like it's easy to feel like a failure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that reminds me of that bumper sticker that we all know so well, you know. The one that says something like, ask your teenager a question now while he still knows everything. So, nobody knows that bumper sticker? That is very common, yeah. No, I didn't make it up. I've seen it. It doesn't say exactly that, but it's something like that. So, I'm familiar with this story.

[74:58]

And so, the artist, you know, he's an artist. The hard part, I think, is to really be clear yourself that it's true that you don't know, you know. I mean, what happens, why relations with young people often go down the drain so fast is that it's very natural for us when somebody tells us constantly, like your teenage son or daughter is constantly telling you you're wrong about everything, you immediately assert, you know, your rightness, right? And then it's all downhill from there. So, I think it is important in this case, as in all cases, to always recognize that one doesn't really know. You know, what one knows at any given time, as Dogen says, you know, you can only see as far as your eye of practice can reach. So, at this time, you know what you know because of your life. If your life had been a different life, you'd know something else. And tomorrow, your life will be different than it is today and your views change. So, it's important to know that and have a sense of flexibility and really listening

[76:03]

to what anybody says, especially, you know, a teenage son or daughter in your own house. The trick, though, is that one has the responsibility within parameters, you know, of being a parent. So, you can say, well, yes, it's true, you know, I don't know everything. My knowledge of the world and of you and of myself only goes so far. However, as a person in this role, your parent right now, I'm responsible. So, I have to say no, I have to say yes. I think that usually most of our no's and our reactions against our teenage children are we probably don't need them because most of them come from fear, stubbornness, you know. So, one has to look very sincerely at one's own heart and see, am I saying no to this because I'm stubborn?

[77:04]

Am I saying no to this because I'm afraid? Am I saying no to this because it's an expectation that I would say no or I should say no? Or am I saying no to it because I'm really touching bottom with who I am and what I think and what I really believe is for the welfare of this person as a person that I love very much. And when you come to that place, then you kind of like say, no, you know, that can't do it, you know, won't work. And then when they say, I'm doing it anyway or I'll beat you up, what are you going to do? I mean, you actually can't make somebody, somebody who's bigger than you and can steal the car keys, you can't make them do anything. You better know that. It's frustrating when you think, you know, they should be doing this. I said they should do it and, you know, they're not doing it. You can't make anybody, somebody who's 16, 17 years old, you cannot make them do something that they do not want to do. You can only say that, you know, I'm your parent and this is very important to me and I don't think you can do this. And if you do it, I'll feel this way or I'll do this or whatever, but you can't,

[78:05]

if you know that in the beginning, you won't kind of get uptight about it. So we could all do a lot better. You can't, see, as always, the other person, forget about it. You can't control how they're going to react, whether it's your teenage son, your five-year-old daughter, or your husband or wife, or the President of the United States, you know, they're going to do what they do. And you're not going to be able to make them do what they won't do. So always the issue is, what do I do? How is my mind? How do I react? And of course, your best shot at having people behave in a good way towards you is if you take care of yourself. And so I think if you treat your children, if you do that work yourself and relate to them from that place, you have the best chance of having them respect your wishes and your points of view. So it's a struggle, I mean, you know, because nobody can get you as good as that son or daughter, you know,

[79:08]

that age, they can get you every time. Don't get tricked into thinking that, you know, you're the parent. Don't think that. A friend of mine is writing a book about conflict resolution and falling. Oh yeah? How these things are avoided. Yeah, yeah. And the way that you show that you're being attentive when you're listening to anyone, especially your teenager, is that you hold your feet. Yeah, that's a good thing, yeah. That means that you're not going to jump in if you're listening. Yeah, yeah. And if you don't hold your feet, you're not listening. Yeah, right. Yeah. Well, that's it, to listen, to really listen means to drop all your preconceptions, yeah. That's a good custom. Of course, if we did it, we would, in five minutes, find a way to hold our feet and still not listen. Would not take very long. Because did you know you can listen to somebody and go like this? That's our version of that, right?

[80:09]

And you're not listening. You're just going like this. Yeah. Somebody here in the middle. Yeah. Yeah, I think that probably varies. I think probably some artists are in love with the objects of what they make, maybe. But I'm kind of more like you, I understand that way.

[81:12]

But that makes sense, doesn't it? Because what it's about is not the accumulation of objects that you've made, but rather the experience, the need for this experience. So, it's an odd kind of thing, but you can see the sense in that, right? One needs to have a certain kind of experience, a certain kind of confrontation with reality, and one needs to do that regularly. It's like if you meditate once, you need to do it again. If you do it every day, you don't just do it once, right? So one needs to go back over and over again. It's almost like every day we go through the whole story of creation, and we have to return every day back to the beginning of creation. You know what I mean? As the world, during the course of the day, the world wears out for us, you know? And we have to go back to the beginning. Maybe that's what art is, or meditation is, going back to the beginning. Starting life over again. Freshening it up, refreshing.

[82:13]

Yeah? Mm-hmm? Yeah, on that note, I'm a choreographer, and I've struggled a lot over the years. I finally feel like I've had some success, but part of that, recently I was given a grant that I probably would have felt really good about two years ago, but then I got another grant, and now I find myself in this kind of trap of like, what exactly would make me feel valid? Yeah. I think that being an artist, for me, has put me on that very edge financially of almost insanity, you know, and going back and seeing my work and saying, oh, okay, I know why I do this. It's because it's really meaningful to me. And then, you know, like not being able to fix my car. Oh, I don't really know why I do this. Mm-hmm. And that struggle of, or the feeling that it's so impermanent, and being really attached to this thing that I love to do, but keep judging myself,

[83:15]

like, when am I going to be really able to take care of myself? Yeah. And like, who's going to give me that deep validation? Right. And I realized recently that I don't. Yeah. And that the process is just going back and doing it, and working with letting go of that attachment. Mm-hmm, right. Yeah, I don't know if you heard all her words when she was talking about the problem. I kind of alluded to it in my talk of, you know, you're an artist and you're getting a grant, and you don't get the grant. You do get the grant. You get the grant. You feel legitimate. You don't get the grant. You don't feel legitimate, and you're kind of stuck in that, and that's very difficult. And yes, don't get me started about grants. I hate the whole idea of grants. You know, it's a terrible, terrible thing. Terrible thing. But anyway, yeah, I think I was talking about this a little bit at the end when I said that, I pointed out that this whole thing is very difficult.

[84:16]

It's really difficult, no matter which way you turn. If you're successful, it's difficult. If you're a total flop, it's difficult. If you're in between, it's difficult. If your art is worth a lot of money, it's difficult. If you're constantly chasing after grants, it's difficult. There's no way to get around that. So that's why you have to pay a lot of attention to working through for yourself over and over and over again the question, what am I doing here? And that question that I take on for myself and that I actively work on all the time is what keeps me alive. And you have to know that the rest of it is going to have an influence on you, but you have to be really clear that if your view of yourself as an artist rises and falls with every grant, you're not going to be able to sustain it and you'll end up being very unhappy, even if you are very successful, because you'll end up being the person that the grantors have created. And that's not why you signed up for that.

[85:18]

Nobody who dedicates themselves to an art does it because they want a social position or they want to make money, even if there's that mixed in with it. And there's always some of that mixed in with it. But basically, the impulse is very pure and one has to work very hard at going back to that impulse. And sometimes there are some very tough life choices that you have to face in the process of that. And there's no way of getting around it, I'm afraid. No way of getting around it. So I think you have to view it as a noble struggle that is doomed to failure, and that's the beauty of it. That's the only way. That's the beauty of it. Just like those people that Henry Miller went around interviewing. They just were in their obscure corners doing what they were doing and they just continued. So you find a way to, what is that impulse in me? I validate that. How can I manifest it in my life from today until the day I die and not let them get the best of me?

[86:19]

Like William Carlos Williams, the poet. See, I always admired Williams and Stevens. Those were always my ideals. Because both of them, in the beginning, they made up their mind that they'd get a job. And Stevens was a physician, and Williams was a vice president of the Hartford Life Insurance Company. And they had that one job their whole life. In fact, when they tried to make Stevens, in his 70s, he was already a famous poet, plenty of money. They tried to force him to retire as vice president of the Hartford Life Insurance. And he did all these nasty office politics so that he wouldn't be forced out in his 70s. And he worked at that job for like 50 years or 30 years, whatever it was. So I always admired that. But Williams, on his deathbed, said, Don't let the bastards get the best of you. So that's good advice, you know. Don't you think?

[87:21]

And I don't think he said that with bitterness. He was bitter, a lot. Because the poets didn't like his poetry for a long time. The people who were in control of poetry. He fought bitterly against the people who were in control of poetry. But I think that he, in the end, was victorious. But he had to be tough. He had a plan from the very beginning, how he was going to survive. And I think that he was a doctor. He was a poet in the beginning. He decided to become a doctor because he knew that he didn't want to have to starve as a poet. And he thought that being a doctor would be a good way to feed his art. So one has to come up with a plan for how to live, how to survive, knowing what the costs are. See, I was lucky. I lucked into this. I never worked an honest day in my life. But that's very unusual.

[88:26]

What? Yeah, just for a little while. That was a good job. I like that. Possibly. Yeah, I'm going to retire as Abbott soon. Yeah. One more year. Well, or something. To do something. Yeah? Oh yeah? Oh yeah, I had so much fun teaching in high school. That was the greatest. Yeah. Very hard, though. You have to work hard. Work night and day at that job. But it's a delight. But it's hard to get a job doing that, you know, because late middle age, white male is not a good... I remember when I was trying to get a job, which I never got, going to the interviews, you know, it was tough. All these bright young people. I felt like a...

[89:32]

I walk into the interview and say, I know you don't want to hire me, but... Oh well, something will work out, I'm sure. I'll become a... what do you call it? I'll work for an organization that gives grants to artists. Program officer. Program officer, right. Program officer. No, the way that they do it, the program officers, they say, Oh, are you doing something that works really well? Good, then you're not eligible for the grant. We're looking for someone who's doing something that probably hasn't worked yet. We'll give you money for that. So then you have to constantly think about ways to explain what you're doing in a way as if you never did it before. And nobody ever did it before. So you have to explain it that way. Then they'll say, Oh, very good. Now we can be creative by giving you this money to do this thing that nobody ever did before, even though it's something that's been done thousands of times. The cleverness is that you found out a way to say it,

[90:34]

explain it, that nobody ever thought of it before. Something like that. Ah. Mm hmm. I had an interesting experience. It turns out it's cross-cultural because I've been painting Indians for 10 years. And they sent me to an Indian director, Mr. Stoney, who paints paintings himself. And I arrived there with my paintings and I had no shortage of them. But I didn't know, you know, what do I say to this man? I'm telling him what his culture is and my paintings. He's a painter. He knows all this. But some years later he told me that what he remembered from that interview that you're always doing prints and transparency and everything.

[91:39]

What he remembered was that I said, I had to do that. He understood that. Yeah, right. Your dancers started out by saying that. Yeah, that's right. We had to do it. So we did it.

[92:02]

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