I read this book back in 2002 when I aspired to be a roving, down-and-out, bohemian novelist. I remember staying up late into the night underlining passages that felt like a clear expression of a worldview I had never considered. Nachmanovitch asks us to treat every moment of our lives as an input to a creative project: be it a painting, a short story, a computer program, or a story to be re-told.

As I look back over my journals from that time of life, I constantly carried creative inspiration. My journals were filled with drawings of homes and cabins I would one day build, outlines of stories I would one day write, some photographic motif to explore, sketches of coffee shops I no longer remember. Now I occasionally feel the creative impulse come back to me after, say, visiting a museum, but I'm far from the book's appealing ideal of treating life as clay with which to shape art.

mulle meeldib, kui rõõmsad viiuldajad (vioolaldajad...) kirjutavad oma loome(-tootmis)protsessist kui sest ainsast. sest see on nii relatable. isegi mulle (kõik on viiulit näinud ja julgemad isegi katsunud). aga iga sellise raamatuga, olgu selleks kasvõi Elleri või Oja biograafia, kus helid põrkuvad vaid keelpillikeeltel, mõtlen ma, et kui mina peaksin tulevikus kirjutama midagigi seoses oboemänguga, kaotan ma ka oma senise säästliku lugejas/kuulajaskonna. sest hautbois on pasun. see on pasun.

jälle raamat, mis sattus kätte täpppselt õigel ajal! ja kirjutas täpselt õigest asjast. vähemalt nii mulle tundub. nii mulle tundub, et selle raamatu ees kniksutades suudan tänasest õhtust alates klaveri taga oma potentsiaalseid frustratsioonikünniseid ületada. olgu nendeks probleemid arenduses, olematu või liiga lihtlabane ABA vorm või muusa puudus. mul tunne, et nüüd ma teen. teen nii, et endale meeldib jm! äsjamainitud loetelust hoolimata!
Nachmanovitsch improviseerib, kirjutab ja improviseerib. ja tegeleb zen-budismiga. viiteid oli Piacassost Pazini. tore sundimatus ja pretensioonitus, mis tihti pealkirjadega "... Life and Art..." kaasas käivad. soovitan kõigile, kes tahavad oma loomingulisust iivata, seda avastada või seda meelde tuletada! igati ~inspireeriv~ lugemine:)

I won't lie this book sent me into a flow state. I finished it in one sitting. Everything in this book felt intuitive and easy to physically understand. I think we know these things we just don't know what exactly to look out for AND the exact words for it. Play and creativity are so curious...

6 stars. Incredible incredible book about the art of playing and how important “play” has been in cultures of past and present.

BBs:

We all know how pearls are made. When a grain of grit accidentally slips into an oyster's shell, the oyster encysts it, secreting more and more of a thick, smooth mucus that hardens in microscopic layer after layer over the foreign irritation until it becomes a perfectly smooth, round, hard, shiny thing of beauty. The oyster thereby transforms both the grit and itself into something new, transforming the intrusion of error or otherness into its system, completing the gestalt according to its own oyster nature. If the oyster had hands, there would be no pearl. Because the oyster is forced to live with the irritation for an extended period of time, the pearl comes to be.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. (Wow)

Love the process but fall in love with the rituals behind the process. There is a difference. Prepare the tools. From buying the tools to cleaning and maintaining and repairing them, develop an intimate, living, years-long relationship with them. Say good-bye to distractions. Let the session flow. The opening ritual, taking the violin out of the case, to setting up the computer, getting into the dance clothes, to putting your football boots on, opening the books, mixing the paints, is pleasurable in and of itself. I eventually learned to treat each solitary writing session home the same way I treat a live performance. In other words, I learned to treat myself with the same care and respect I give to an audience. This was not a trivial lesson. These rituals and preparations function to discharge and clear obscurations and nervous doubts, to invoke our muses however we may conceive them, to open our capacities of mediumship and concentration, and to stabilize our person for the challenges ahead. In this intensified, turned-on, tuned-up state, creativity becomes everything we do and perceive. (WOW)

Unless you have been thoroughly drenched in perspiration you cannot expect to see a palace of pearls on a blade of grass.

Addiction consumes energy and leads to slavery. Practice generates energy and leads to freedom.

The Sufis also speak of a related experience, samä, which means dancing yourself into ecstasy. In this state, body and mind are so intensely occupied with activity, the brain waves are so thoroughly entrained by the compelling and powerful rhythms, that ordinary self is left behind and a form of heightened awareness arises.da Vinci was one of the great pioneers of improvisation on the viola da braccio, and with his friends put on entire operas in which both the poetry and the music were made up on the spot.

Reading, listening, looking at art is a matter of active response, of dialogue with the material. (sunny: why we call reading “talking to the author” in our house)

I need energy to acquire skill, energy to practice, energy to keep going through the inevitable set-backs, energy to keep going when things look good and I am tempted to sit back and relax. I need physical energy, intellectual energy, libidinal energy, spiritual energy. The means to tapping these energies are well known: Exercise the body, eat well, sleep well, keep track of dreams, medi-tate, enjoy the pleasures of life, read and experience widely. When blocked, tap into the great block-busters: humor, friends, and nature. The specific preparations begin when I enter the temenos, the play space. In ancient Greek thought, the temenosis a magic circle, a delimited sacred space within which special rules apply and in which extraordinary events are free to occur.

New organs of perception come into being as a result of necessity.
Therefore, O man, increase your necessity, so that you may increase your perception.
(JALLALUDIN RUMI)

The only way out of the complexity is through it. Ultimately, the only techniques that can help us are those we invent ourselves. Nor can we talk about the creative process, because there are different personality types, and the creative processes of one are not the same as those of another.

and black-and-white photography may achieve greater power than color. I ragas, or solo jazz play, sounds are limited to a restricted sphere, within which a gigantic range of inventiveness opens up. If you have all the colors available, you are sometimes almost too free. With one dimension constrained, play becomes freer in other dimensions.

Limits yield intensity. When we play in the temenos defined by our self-chosen rules, we find that containment of strength amplifies strength. Commitment to a set of rules (a game) frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible. Igor Stravinsky writes: "The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit


The literature of Zen, on which I have drawn heavily because of its deep penetration of the breakthrough experience, abounds with accounts of kensho and satori moments of illumination and moments of total change of heart. There come points in your life when you simply kick the door open. But there is no ultimate breakthrough; what we find in the development of a creative life is an open-ended series of provisional breakthroughs. In this journey there is no endpoint, because it is the journey into the soul.


Every attempt we make is imperfect; yet each one of those imperfect attempts is an occasion for a delight unlike anything else on earth.

Emily Dickinson said in this regard that the poem is exterior to time. Improvisation is also called extemporization, meaning both "outside of time" and "from the time."

We can then say, with the Balinese,
"We have no art. Everything we do is art."

but we still have to give up our expectations and a certain degree of control- give up being safely wrapped in our own story. We still engage in the important practice of planning and scheduling-not to rigidly lock in the future, but to tune up the self.

The essence of style is this: We have something in us, about us; it can be called many things, but for now let's call it our original nature. We are born with our original nature, but on top of that, as we grow up, we accommodate to the patterns and habits of our culture, family, physical environment, and the daily business of the life we have taken on.
What we are taught solidifies as "reality." Our persona, the mask we show the world, develops out of our experience and training, step by step from infancy to adulthood.

when god decided to invent everything be took one breath bigger than' a circus tent and everything began when man determined to destroy himself be picked the was of shall and finding only why smashed it into because

The ancient Taoists spoke of one's own being while in the meditative state as an " unsculpted block of time." As stone is to a sculptor, so time is to a musician.

Spiritual traditions the world over are full of references to this mysterious juice: ch' in China and ki in Japan (em-bodying the great Tao in each individual); kundalini and brama in India; mana in Polynesia; orendé and manitu among the Iroquois and Algonquins; axé among the Afro-Brazilian condomblé cults; baraka among the Sufis in the Middle East; élan vital on the streets of Paris.

technique (techne from the Greek for “art").

Mastery means responsibility, ability to respond in real time to the need of the moment.

There is a German word, “funktionslust”, which means the pleasure of doing, of producing an effect, as distinct from the pleasure of attaining the effect of having something. Creativ-ty exists in the searching even more than in the finding or being found.

The word enthusiasm is Greek for "filled with theos
"_filled with God.



In the science of psychophysics there is a law (the Weber-Fechner law that relates the objective value of stimulation (a light, a sound, a touch) to its subjective value (the sensation we feel). The gist of it is that our sensitivity diminishes in proportion to the total amount of stimulation. If there are two candles lit in a room, we easily notice the difference in brightness when a third candle 15 lit. But if there are fifty candles burning, we are unlikely to notice the difference made by a fifty-first. If there is less total stimulation, each small change makes more of a differ-ence, or in Gregory Bateson's phrase, it's a difference that makes a difference.

I try things and throw them away, as many times as necessary. Brahms once remarked that the mark of an artist is how much he throws away. Nature, the great creator, is always throwing things away.

To create, we need both technique and freedom from technique. To this end we practice until our skills become unconscious.

When skill reaches a certain level it hides itself.

One of the many catch-22's in the business of creativity is that you can't express inspiration without skill, but if you are too wrapped up in the professionalism of skill you obviate the surrender to accident that is essential to inspiration.

we speak a language that uses nouns and verbs. Thus we are predisposed to believe that the world consists of things and forces that move the things. À horsemanship teacher I know has her beginning adult pupils ride bareback and without reins. She says she refuses to give them the physical means of controlling the horse until they first learn to control the horse without tools and aids, with gravity, weight, and thought alone. This means becoming one with the horse loving the horse.

After periods during which one has actively tried to solve a problem, but has not succeeded, the sudden right orientation of the situation, and with it the so-lution, tend to occur at moments of extreme mental passivity. . . A well-known physicist in Scotland once told me that this kind of thing is generally recognized by physicists in Britain. "We often talk about the Three B's," he said. "the Bus, the Bath, and the Bed. That's where the great discoveries are made in our science.

WOLFGANG KÖHLER

The word desire comes from de-sidere, "away from your star." It means elongation from the source, and the concomi-tant, powerful magnetic pull to get back to the source. In the Suf view, the beloved is the friend we love, while the Beloved is the Friend, God; and they are one. Love is a state of resonance between absence from and nearness to the be-loved, a vibratory, harmonized resonance between being two and being one. In the art of archery the desire of the arrow and the target to be together is such that they are, in the mind of the master archer, already one.33 In the same way, a fine baseball outfielder is already one with the ball long before he catches it. The archer is practicing a kind of intelleto every time he draws the bow, feeling the interpene-tration of self and object, self and tool; seeing the identity of the moment of longing, the moment of preparation, and the moment of fulfillment.

"The whole difference between construction and creation," wrote G. K. Chesterton, is this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Paradoxically, the more you are yourself, the more universal your message. As you develop and individuate more deeply, you break through into deeper layers of the collective consciousness and the collective unconsciousness.

Zen master Dogen, in the thirteenth century, said, "To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to perceive oneself as all things. To realize this is to cast off the body and mind of self and others. When you have reached this stage you will be detached even from enlightenment, but will practice it continually without thinking about it. "

I listened to this book and think it might be better in physical copy. In audio it came off as a guy preaching at me about the ills of creating bad art. Or creating no art. Basically no matter what we’re all disappointing artists but somehow aren’t creating enough.

In the fall, I discovered this book in my boyfriend's apartment.

As I was falling in love, this excerpt resonated deeply with me:

"Though love is a material act (whether sexual love, friendship, parenting, or any other kind of devotion, love is always an act), it lifts us out of the ordinary world into a kind of mystic participation with one another. We tune, more and more finely, our capacity to sense the other person's subtleties. We are willing to be infinitely patient and persevering. In a sense, genius equals compassion, because both involve the infinite capacity for taking pains. The great lovers, the great world reformers and peacemakers, are those who have passed beyond their individual ego demands and are able to hear the cries of the world. The motive is not self-gratification, but gratification of a bigger being of which we are part. Genius and compassion signify a transcendent, painstaking thoroughness and attention to detail--taking the trouble to take care of our body and mind and everyone else's body and mind.

This is exactly what we do when we set out on the adventure of loving another human being. We learn, the easy or the hard, to cultivate receptivity and mutual, expressive emancipation."

This book breathes life into you. Like Kafka said, a book like an ace capable of breaking the frozen sea inside of us.
The second part is phenomenal, but I recommend reading through the first half first even if it takes up speed slowly. The second part becomes explosive if you carry all the information from the more abstract first chapters.
It is of course a great book for creatives. The author is a musician so many of his insights come from that experience. It is however a viewpoint universal in reach and applicable to any life experience. I personally see it as the other side of the coin for a book like Atomic Habits. Great advice and all but giving another perspective, and perhaps saving you from going to deep down the rabbit-hole of willing
your whole life routine into meticulously designed habits. Read it, think about it, gift it to your friends. You’ll not regret it.

Philosophy of improvisation--cool. The author is an expert in about 85 million different fields, and it helps him write a truly interdisciplinary book that will have some relevance to just about anyone. I only got half-way through this before returning it to the library. I plan to buy it; it's way too dense to read through quickly. The writing is clear, there are just too many ideas in this little book.

Simpática y honorable apuesta estética hecha por un violista. La improvisación como el motor para la creación de la obra de arte. Y para la vida, ¿por qué no? Una apuesta un tanto naive, aunque más que válida.

Very interesting exploration of the artistic process and of how to achieve a state of play to let creativity flow.

It feels a bit too spiritual at times (but that might just be me not having experienced what the author describes enough to understand) but is definitely well worth a read, especially if you play music or engage in any other artistic pursuit!

a must read for anyone who wants to develop their creativity. i read this book in college and have revisited it multiple times.

This is one of my favorit books! I go back to it often when I need a reminder about the role of play and creativity in life. This book is filled with stories, and lessons about the bigs and smalls of life. The take home message is: Relax, and bring play and into all aspects of life!