In my last blog entry I riffed on the notion of talent, the gist of my convictions being that everyone is born multitalented. A brave voice rose in the wilderness, pointedly letting me know I’m crazy. Just kidding! The brave voice, who answers to the name of Lisa Marie, makes some very good points. Here they are.

I think there is a problem with the word “talent.” Isn't it used to mean the exceptional thing, the thing that most people don't have? I think one tends to use the word unthinkingly in order to designate that happy (and indeed, rare) combination of qualities and circumstances (energy, enthusiasm, time, a little salutary egoism to enable one to be a bit annoyingly obsessive, good teachers, etc.) and one ends up being mislead by the existence of the word into thinking one is referring to something else, some further magic entity, apart from these ingredients.

And so my more somber version of your “we are all multi-talented'” would be to say “we quite probably all aren't, but that this is a lot less of a problem than we have been led to believe... particularly if it is possible to muster energy, enthusiasm, time, egoism, etc.”

Genius, now that would be something else again, I suppose.

This is my abbreviation of what the brave voice is saying in the wilderness:

“Talent” as people normally see it is a kind of illusion; people do things well because of down-to-earth qualities such as energy, enthusiasm, time, and so on—not because of a magic, mysterious quality, which we might want to call “genius” instead. It’s not a problem to be “untalented” as long as you find the necessary time, energy, and enthusiasm to accomplish your goals.

I see talent as an innate capacity to do something, a biological inheritance that is independent of these down-to-earth qualities but that needs some of them to blossom. So, I do think everyone is multitalented indeed, having many built-in capacities from birth. Ultimately, however, the brave voice is quite right: things happen not by magic but through dedicated effort. Here's the film maker Ridley Scott in a recent interview in the magazine Film Comment: "[My mother] was a real force of nature. [My brother] Tony and I inherited perseverance from her. It's really the thing you need to succeed. I always say it's stamina, stamina, stamina, then perseverance, and last is talent."

As for "genius," I’d like to offer a very specific definition. I see a genius not as someone with brilliant inborn capacities, but someone with an original insight who creates a new paradigm within his or her field. In that sense Claude Debussy was a genius, since he created a new musical paradigm contributing to the development of, among other things, atonality; but Maurice Ravel wasn’t a genius, since his work—however brilliant—hewed to the paradigms, tonal and rhythmic, that came before him. Ludwig van Beethoven: genius. Felix Mendelssohn: not (even though he was an astounding child prodigy). Miguel de Cervantes: genius (he "invented" the modern novel). Jane Austen: not. Mahatma Gandhi: genius (he created a new paradigm, non-violent resistance). The Dalai Lama: not (he embraces a paradigm that was fully formed before his birth). But note that I admire the Dalai Lama unconditionally, and I think he represents humanity's highest ideals. Here I'm using the word "genius" as a technical term, narrowly (and perhaps idiosyncratically) defined.

Given a choice between talent, genius, and stamina, I know which one I would pick for myself and my career. Phew! Writing this blog entry has exhausted the resident genius here, so please excuse me while I take a nap.

In my recent installments of The Naked Beginner I recounted how I used to suffer from the misconception I had no talent for drawing, and how I cured myself from that handicap with help from a fictional character, an imaginary friend, and a dead white male. Here I offer you a little meditation on the notion of talent. Since the meditation applies to all people, I’m posting this blog entry on multiple categories.

1. Everyone is born multitalented; this you can see by watching a few kindergarten kids at play, inventing every sort of game and improvising brilliantly at arts, sport, music, relationships, and anything else. The tragedy is that many of those kindergartners (and I’m talking about you and me and your brother and your sister) will grow to  “forget” how talented they were from the first.
2. You have hidden talents you don’t know about. Every day as you go about your normal existence, amazing things lie inside you waiting to be discovered.
3. Talents are eternal: they are always there, inside you, from birth to death. When the expression of a talent is squashed, the talent itself remains. At any time in your life, if the conditions are right the talent will come right back out.
4. You can be absolutely sure about something and yet be absolutely wrong about it. Wanna bet? The principle is universal. It applies to your feeling certain you don’t have talent for something—drawing, music, computers, managing people, you name it.
   
5. If you’ve tried to do something and failed miserably, you might still have a talent for it; perhaps you just need a good teacher, a good partner, a good environment. Think how many mean and incompetent teachers are out there, and how discouraging they can be.
6. “I’ve never danced in my life! I don’t have a talent for it!” Can you see what’s wrong with these words?
7. Timing is everything. Talent is always there, but sometimes you need to wait until you are good and ready to explore it. And you may not be ready until you’re 13, or 26, or 39, or 52. (Here’s testing your talent for multiplication tables!)
   
8. Talent is immutable; it’s already there inside you, and it’ll always be there as a latent force. But your manner of tapping into it is highly variable. It’s easy to confuse the two. If you go about blindly trying to develop a talent, your failure doesn’t mean you don’t have the talent.
9. You can develop a new skill in intermittent bursts of time and effort, as long as the effort is intelligent and the time well-spent.
10. If someone has a great deal of innate facility for something but no patience to develop the skill over the long term, does he or she really have “talent”?
11. Okay, it’s possible for you not to have talent for something and feel sure that you do. Still, that’d be a lesser problem than having talent and feeling sure you don’t.
12. Talent isn’t contagious, but enthusiasm is.
    

Hey, you talented readers out there: How about submitting your stories about hidden talents, talents snuffed out by mean teachers, talents that have surprised and delighted you as you went about discovering them?

You’ve been playing with a balloon and learning some surprising lessons about your voice and your upper body. The time has come for you to broaden your exploration. Take a tennis ball in your hand. It doesn’t matter if it’s old and beat-up. If you don’t have a tennis ball at home, an orange or tangerine will do, anything with a similar dimension and texture. Tennis ball or citrus fruit, just hold it as a playful, mischievous, curious child would: What can I do with this thing? In how many ways can I amuse myself? How can I use this object to annoy my mother?

Objects invite the resourceful child inside us to discover the capacity of the hands to hold, squeeze, pinch, poke, caress, slap, throw, catch, and so on. Squeeze the tennis ball, for instance. It yields to some degree, it resists to some degree, both more or less at once. You can feel the ball’s rubbery core at the same time you feel its outer surface, fuzzy like a kitten’s back. And you can also feel the skin, flesh, and bones of your own hand, which—like the ball—is innately resilient and multilayered.

It’s a double exploration: you find out about the object at the same time you explore your hand, or more broadly, your whole self. Throw the ball up in the air, catch it; throw it from hand to hand, find a rhythm and let the rhythm do the work for you. The tennis ball was born to be thrown, and it invites you to go with it, to enter the game and never leave it.  Let your palms, fingers, wrists, and arms enjoy the object's bounciness, and before long their own inborn elasticity will enter your awareness. Hold the ball in between the palms of both hands and roll it about, massaging the ball with your palms and your palms with the ball. The ball’s roundness, its shape, texture, and weight all contribute to making the experience delightful. And the delight comes not from the ball itself, but from your hands.

Every object in your life has lots of wisdom to impart—and I mean every object without exception, including headbands, eyeglasses, furniture, shoes, belts, toothbrushes, cell phones. All you need is to approach each object with the right frame of mind, which I propose to call “readiness.” Needless to say, your violin, your piano, your flute are fine partners in the game of object wisdom. And they’re dying to play with you.

Readiness

Ø n. the state or quality of being ready

Ready

Ø adj. (readier, readiest)

1a prepared mentally or physically for some experience or action

1b prepared for immediate use

2a (1) willingly disposed

2a (2) likely to do something

2b spontaneously prompt

3 notably dexterous, adroit, or skilled

4 immediately available

All right, then. You’ve been talking to a balloon and discovering plenty of things about sound and vibration. You might as well use the balloon to make other discoveries. Grab a partner for this exercise. Stand facing each other. Hold the balloon lightly in your hands, about a foot or so away from your midriff. Ask your partner to place her palms on the backs of your hands, touching you as lightly as you’re touching the balloon. Tell her to keep touching your hands steadily, then start moving the balloon slowly. It doesn’t matter how you move the balloon: turn it clock- or counterclockwise, move it away from your body or closer to it, move it up and down in space.

Watch your partner as you move the balloon. Most likely she’ll contort her whole body in an effort to follow your hands and the balloon as they move here and there. She might scrunch her head and neck, raise her shoulders, shorten one side of her abdomen, and so on. She won’t be aware of her misuse; and, once she does become aware of it, she'll claim it’s “normal” to move like that.

In truth all she needs to do is to make the articulations of her arms—from shoulders to fingertips—mobile like the joints of a marionette. Then, as you move the balloon, your partner can make constant adjustments to all her arm joints, bending or unbending each as needed, lifting or dropping her elbows, her upper arms, or her forearms. Her head, neck, and trunk don’t need to move altogether!

Take turns holding the balloon and moving it. Then make the exercise more complex. While moving the balloon, ask your partner to sing a children’s song. You’ll be amazed at the effects on her arms: she'll hold them so stiffly you won't be able to move the balloon. Her efforts at singing distract her from paying attention to her arms, and she misplaces her intentions and her energies—as we all do, more often than we care to admit.

The balloon teaches you about your perceptions of yourself and of others, your understanding of what is normal or abnormal, the working of your arm joints, the way you apportion energy and effort as you move. After working with the balloon for a while, go play your instrument—be it the cello, the piano, the oboe, or the didgeridoo—and see what you can do with the wisdom you learned from the balloon.

For this exploration you’ll need a sound system and a balloon—a regular rubber balloon like you see at children’s parties, round and plain, blown to about the size of your head.

On your sound system, play a CD of something lively, vibrant, and variable in dynamics and tone. I love doing this exercise to the Golden Gate Quartet—four guys with very different but well-blended voices, singing tunes of a Biblical bent with tremendous rhythmic vitality. But anything sonorous will do. While the CD is playing, hold the balloon in your hands, as lightly as possible. Walk over your sound system’s speaker; stand right next to it; and place the balloon against the speaker.

The balloon captures the vibrations from the sound system and magnifies them. And the vibrations make the balloon come alive, all sounds, all voices, all musical elements making their own individual vibrations. Sound becomes tangible, something you can hold in your hands. You have to do it to believe it. And even when you do it, you won’t believe it.

After doing this for a while, turn the music off and do another exercise. Hold the balloon (always with a light touch) close to your mouth and speak into the balloon. Yep—the balloon also captures your voice and makes it tangible. Try speaking high, low, soft, and loud. Lengthen your vowels to enhance the vibrations: “Leeeeengthen your vooooooowels.” Do the exercise with a friend: ask him or her to stand facing you, the balloon between your mouths. Take turns talking. You’ll hear and feel the differences between your voices.

While talking into the balloon, push your head back and down into your neck, shortening the neck and spine. Your voice will change considerably, and so will its vibrations. I bet you’ll like your vibrations better when the neck is lengthening and the head well-poised.

Moral of the story: Each sound has its vibration, and the sounds of a well-coordinated musician have the liveliest vibrations. Become attuned to this phenomenon and you’ll develop your field of perception, your coordination, your aesthetics, and more besides.

Tap your head with your left hand and rub your stomach with the right one, and you’ll sense the mutual influence between the right and left arms. This we call bilateral transfer—a dialogue between the two sides of the body on matters of position, movement, tension, relaxation, and balance, all of which affect the body’s overall coordination.

The legs also affect the arms, and vice-versa. Play a fast, loud passage at the piano while holding your feet off the floor. If the active support of the feet and legs is missing, the arms must work much harder. This is quadrilateral transfer—the interplay of energies between all limbs.

The dialogue between the left and right sides of the body, and between the upper and lower limbs, never stops. Like all dialogue, it can be a collaboration or a fight.

To get a fight going, hold a heavy paperback in one hand and a light bulb in the other. Each hand has a specific job to do, but each hand confuses the other and is confused by it. One hand “wants” to relax, the other “wants” to firm up. Their opposing intentions get crossed, and the body and brain go haywire.

Try another experiment. Write a short sentence by hand on a piece of paper. Now write it again, and while writing tug at your hair with the free hand. Make the tug be strong and rhythmic. You may be surprised at what happens to your handwriting. (I did this experiment with my wife, and her handwriting actually improved, becoming bolder and more legible. She did mis-spell a word or three, though.)

Because of bilateral transfer, musicians sometimes misdiagnose their technical problems, becoming convinced that the left hand, say, is to be blamed for some technical accident when in reality it’s the misuse of the right hand that causes the left hand to go awry.

Suppose a cellist is struggling with a tricky passage that challenges her left hand: a trill followed by a large shift along the fingerboard. The left hand is fast and busy, doing different things in quick succession. Meanwhile the bowing arm does something simple and steady. The average cellist focuses on the busy left hand, giving it thought and care. Naturally, her thoughts are coated in emotion: eagerness, worry, impatience, anger. At the same time, the cellist takes the right hand for granted, assuming its role is minor. The passage remains frustratingly difficult, and the cellist puts ever more energy into the left hand and involves her neck and shoulders in the effort.

But if the cellist changes her focus from her left hand to her bowing arm, bilateral transfer comes to her rescue. The right arm proclaims, “My gestures are easy, firm, intelligent; my contact with the string is stable; I have a lovely connection to the back, the pelvis, the legs, the feet, the floor.” It’s a message of intelligence and comfort, with a positive emotional charge. The left hand receives the message, absorbs it, lets itself be influenced by it—and acquires some of those universal qualities (strength, contact, connection, comfort) even though its specific tasks are different from the bowing arm’s simple gestures. As if by miracle, the passage suddenly becomes much easier to master.

In sum, bilateral and quadrilateral transfer are both potentially harmful or constructive, depending on how you go about it.