Mastery

by Robert Greene

  Another cartouche in the temple drawing had the same M-shaped symbol. The first symbol in the cartouche was that of an ibis. With his knowledge of ancient Egyptian history, he knew that the bird was the symbol of the god Thoth. This cartouche could now spell out Thot-mu-sis, or Thuthmose, yet another name of an ancient pharaoh. In another part of the temple he saw a hieroglyphic word that consisted entirely of the equivalent letters of M and S. Thinking in Coptic, he translated the word as mis, which means to “give birth.” Sure enough, in the Greek text of the Rosetta stone he found a phrase referring to a birthday, and identified the equivalent of it in the hieroglyph section.

  Overwhelmed by what he had found, he ran through the streets of Paris to find his brother. He shouted upon entering the room, “I’ve got it!” and then fainted, falling to the floor. After nearly twenty years of a continuous obsession, through endless problems and poverty and setbacks, Champollion had uncovered the key to the hieroglyphs in a few short months of intense labor.

  In the aftermath of his discovery, he would continue to translate one word after another and figure out the exact nature of the hieroglyphs. In the process he would completely transform our knowledge and concept of ancient Egypt. His earliest translations revealed that hieroglyphs, as he suspected, were a sophisticated combination of all three forms of symbols, and had the equivalent of an alphabet far before anyone had imagined the invention of an alphabet. This was not a backward civilization of priests dominating a slave culture and keeping secrets through mysterious symbols, but a vibrant society with a complicated and beautiful written language, one that could be considered the equal of ancient Greek.

  When his discovery was broadcast, Champollion became an instant hero in France. But Dr. Young, his main rival in the field, could not accept defeat. He spent the ensuing years accusing Champollion of fraud and plagiarism, unable to conceive of the idea that someone from such a modest background could pull off such an amazing intellectual feat.

  The story of Champollion versus Dr. Young contains an elemental lesson about the learning process, and illustrates two classic approaches to a problem. In the case of Young, he came to the hieroglyphic puzzle from the outside, fueled by the ambition to be the first to decipher the hieroglyphs and gain fame in the process. To expedite matters, he reduced the writing system of the ancient Egyptians into tidy mathematical formulas, assuming that they represented ideograms. In such a way, he could approach decipherment as if it were a computational feat. To do so, he had to simplify what ended up being revealed as an extremely complex and layered system of writing.

  For Champollion, it was the opposite. He was fueled by a genuine hunger to understand the origins of mankind, and by a deep love of ancient Egyptian culture. He wanted to get at the truth, not gain fame. Because he saw the translation of the Rosetta stone as his Life’s Task, he was willing to devote twenty or more years to the job, or whatever it took to solve the riddle. He did not attack the problem from the outside and with formulas, but rather went through a rigorous apprenticeship in ancient languages and Coptic. It ended up that his knowledge of Coptic proved the decisive key to unraveling the secret. His knowledge of languages made him understand how complex they can be, reflecting the complexity of any great society. When he finally returned to the Rosetta stone with undistracted attention in 1821, his mind shifted to the Creative-Active. He reframed the problem in holistic terms. His decision to first look at the two scripts—demotic and hieroglyph—as purely visual was a stroke of creative genius. In the end, he thought in greater dimensions and uncovered enough aspects of the language to unlock it.

  Many people in various fields tend to follow the Young method. If they are studying economics, or the human body and health, or the workings of the brain, they tend to work with abstractions and simplifications, reducing highly complex and interactive problems into modules, formulas, tidy statistics, and isolated organs that can be dissected. This approach can yield a partial picture of reality, much in the way that dissecting a corpse can tell you some things about the human body. But with these simplifications the living, breathing element is missing. You want to follow instead the Champollion model. You are not in a hurry. You prefer the holistic approach. You look at the object of study from as many angles as possible, giving your thoughts added dimensions. You assume that the parts of any whole interact with one another and cannot be completely separated. In your mind, you get as close to the complicated truth and reality of your object of study as possible. In the process, great mysteries will unravel themselves before your eyes.

  9. Alchemical Creativity and the Unconscious

  The artist Teresita Fernández (b. 1968) has long been fascinated by alchemy—an early form of science whose goal was to transform base materials into gold. (For more on Fernández, see here.) Alchemists believed that nature itself operates through the constant interaction of opposites—earth and fire, sun and moon, male and female, dark and light. By somehow reconciling these opposites, the alchemist believed he could discover the deepest secrets of nature, gain the power to create something out of nothing, and turn dust into gold.

  To Fernández, the art of alchemy resembles in many ways the artistic and creative process itself. First, a thought or idea stirs in the mind of the artist. Slowly he or she transforms this idea into a material work of art, which creates a third element, a response in the viewer—an emotion of some sort that the artist wishes to provoke. This is a magical process, the equivalent of creating something out of nothing, a kind of transmutation of dirt into gold—in this case, the artist’s idea becoming realized, and leading to the stirring of powerful emotions in the spectator.

  Alchemy depends on the reconciliation of various opposite qualities, and in thinking about herself, Fernández can identify many contrary impulses that are reconciled in her work. She is personally drawn to minimalism—a form of expression that communicates through the most minimal amount of material. She likes the discipline and rigor this paring down of materials imposes on her thinking process. At the same time she has a streak of romanticism, and an interest in work that produces strong emotional reactions in viewers. In her work, she likes to mix the sensual with the austere. She has noticed that expressing this and other tensions within herself gives her work a particularly disorienting and dreamlike effect upon viewers.

  Since childhood, Fernández has always had a peculiar sense of scale. She would find it odd and disturbing that a relatively small space or room could evoke a much larger and even a vast space by its layout or the arrangement of windows. Children are generally obsessed with scale, playing with miniaturized versions of the adult world, yet feeling as if these miniatures represent real objects that are much larger. We generally lose this interest as we get older, but in Fernández’s piece Eruption (2005), she brings us back to an awareness of the potentially disturbing emotions that can be evoked by playing with our sense of scale. The piece is a relatively small floor sculpture in the shape of a blob that resembles an artist’s palette. It consists of thousands of clear glass beads layered on the surface. Below the beads lies an enlarged image of an abstract painting, which makes the beads reflect various colors, giving the piece the distinct look of the mouth of a bubbling volcano. We cannot see the underlying image, and we are not aware that the beads themselves are clear. Our eye is simply drawn into the effect, as we imagine much more than is actually there. In the smallest of spaces she has thus created a feeling of a deep and vast landscape. We know it is an illusion, but are moved by the sensations and tensions that the piece creates.

  In making work for an outdoor public space, artists generally go in one of two directions—creating something that blends into the landscape in an interesting way, or instead making something that stands out from the surroundings and calls attention to itself. In creating her piece Seattle Cloud Cover (2006)—at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, Washington—Fernández navigated a space between these two opposite approaches. Along the length of an outdoor pedestrian bridge sp
anning railroad tracks, she placed large colored glass panes, laminated with photographic images of clouds. The panes, which also extend overhead, are semitransparent and are marked with hundreds of clear polka dots at equal lengths that reveal bits of the sky above. As people walk along the bridge, they see above them realistic photographic images of clouds, often standing out against the usual grey skies of Seattle, or sometimes brightened by the sun, or turning kaleidoscopic at sunset. Moving over the bridge, the alternation between real and unreal makes it hard for us to distinguish between the two—a surreal effect that causes powerful feelings of disorientation in the viewer.

  Perhaps the ultimate expression of Fernández’s alchemy can be experienced in her piece Stacked Waters (2009) at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. For this commission, she was confronted with the challenge of creating a striking piece for the vast open space of the museum’s multi-layered atrium, an entryway to the rest of the museum. The atrium is generally bathed in bright light from the large skylights on the ceiling. Instead of struggling to create a sculpture for such a space, Fernández attempted to invert our whole experience of art. When people enter a museum or gallery space, it is most often with a sense of distance and coldness; they stand back and view something for a few moments, then move on. Aiming for a more visceral contact with the viewer than a traditional sculpture could provide, she decided to use the cold white walls of the atrium and its constant flow of patrons as the basis for her alchemical experiment.

  She covered the walls with bands of thousands of highly reflective acrylic strips, saturated in swirls of color from shades of blue to white. The overall effect from standing in the atrium is that of being immersed in an enormous pool of blue water that shimmers from the sunlight above. As people ascend the stairs, they can see in the acrylic strips their own reflections, which are oddly distorted, similar to the effect of seeing things through water. Viewing the strips from up close, it is clear that it is all an illusion created by the most minimal amount of material, and yet the feel of water, the sense of being immersed, remains palpable and strange. The spectators thus become actual parts of the artwork itself, with their own reflections helping to create the illusion. The experience of moving through this dreamlike space makes us conscious once more of the tensions between art and nature, illusion and reality, coldness and warmth, wet and dry, and provokes a powerful intellectual and emotional response.

  Our culture depends in many ways on the creation of standards and conventions that we all must adhere to. These conventions are often expressed in terms of opposites—good and evil, beautiful and ugly, painful and pleasurable, rational and irrational, intellectual and sensual. Believing in these opposites gives our world a sense of cohesion and comfort. To imagine that something can be intellectual and sensual, pleasurable and painful, real and unreal, good and bad, masculine and feminine is too chaotic and disturbing for us. Life, however, is more fluid and complex; our desires and experiences do not fit neatly into these tidy categories.

  As the work of Teresita Fernández demonstrates, the real and the unreal are concepts that exist for us as ideas and constructions, and thus can be played with, altered, commanded, and transformed at will. Those who think in dualities—believing that there is such a thing as “real” and such a thing as “unreal,” and that they are distinct entities that can never become blended into a third, alchemical element—are creatively limited, and their work can quickly become dead and predictable. To maintain a dualistic approach to life requires that we repress many observable truths, but in our unconscious and in our dreams we often let go of the need to create categories for everything, and are able to mix seemingly disparate and contradictory ideas and feelings together with ease.

  Your task as a creative thinker is to actively explore the unconscious and contradictory parts of your personality, and to examine similar contradictions and tensions in the world at large. Expressing these tensions within your work in any medium will create a powerful effect on others, making them sense unconscious truths or feelings that have been obscured or repressed. You look at society at large and the various contradictions that are rampant—for instance, the way in which a culture that espouses the ideal of free expression is charged with an oppressive code of political correctness that tamps free expression down. In science, you look for ideas that go against the existing paradigm, or that seem inexplicable because they are so contradictory. All of these contradictions contain a rich mine of information about a reality that is deeper and more complex than the one immediately perceived. By delving into the chaotic and fluid zone below the level of consciousness where opposites meet, you will be surprised at the exciting and fertile ideas that will come bubbling up to the surface.

  REVERSAL

  In Western culture, a particular myth has evolved that drugs or madness can somehow lead to creative bursts of the highest order. How else to explain the work that John Coltrane did while hooked on heroin, or the great works of the playwright August Strindberg, who seemed clinically insane? Their work is so spontaneous and free, so far beyond the powers of the rational, conscious mind.

  This is a cliché, however, that is easily debunked. Coltrane himself admitted that he did his worst work during the few years he was addicted to heroin. It was destroying him and his creative powers. He kicked the habit in 1957 and never looked back. Biographers who later examined the letters and journals of Strindberg discovered a man who was quite histrionic in public, but who in private life was extremely disciplined. The effect of madness created in his plays is very consciously crafted.

  Understand: to create a meaningful work of art or to make a discovery or invention requires great discipline, self-control, and emotional stability. It requires mastering the forms of your field. Drugs and madness only destroy such powers. Do not fall for the romantic myths and clichés that abound in culture about creativity—offering us the excuse or panacea that such powers can come cheaply. When you look at the exceptionally creative work of Masters, you must not ignore the years of practice, the endless routines, the hours of doubt, and the tenacious overcoming of obstacles these people endured. Creative energy is the fruit of such efforts and nothing else.

  Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.

  —MARCEL PROUST

  VI

  FUSE THE INTUITIVE

  WITH THE RATIONAL:

  MASTERY

  All of us have access to a higher form of intelligence, one that can allow us to see more of the world, to anticipate trends, to respond with speed and accuracy to any circumstance. This intelligence is cultivated by deeply immersing ourselves in a field of study and staying true to our inclinations, no matter how unconventional our approach might seem to others. Through such intense immersion over many years we come to internalize and gain an intuitive feel for the complicated components of our field. When we fuse this intuitive feel with rational processes, we expand our minds to the outer limits of our potential and are able to see into the secret core of life itself. We then come to have powers that approximate the instinctive force and speed of animals, but with the added reach that our human consciousness brings us. This power is what our brains were designed to attain, and we will be naturally led to this type of intelligence if we follow our inclinations to their ultimate ends.

  THE THIRD TRANSFORMATION

  For the writer Marcel Proust (1871–1922), his fate seemed set at birth. He was born incredibly small and frail; for two weeks he hovered near death, but finally pulled through. As a child, he had frequent bouts of illness that kept him at home for months at a time. When he was nine years old, he suffered his first asthma attack and nearly died. His mother, Jeanne, continuously worried about his health, doted on Marcel and accompanied him on his regular trips to the coun
tryside to convalesce.

  And it was on such trips that the pattern of his life became set. Often alone, he developed a passion for reading books. He loved to read about history, and he devoured all forms of literature. His main physical outlet was taking long walks in the country, and here certain sights seemed to captivate him. He would stop and stare for hours at apple blossoms or hawthorn flowers, or at any kind of slightly exotic plant; he found the spectacle of marching ants or spiders working on their webs particularly compelling. He would soon add books on botany and entomology to his reading list. His closest companion in these early years was his mother, and his attachment to her soon went beyond all bounds. They looked alike and shared similar interests in the arts. He could not stand to be away from her for more than a day, and in the few hours in which they were separated he would write her endless letters.