Whenever someone says to me, "Just Do It," I have lost my respect for them. They have no idea what it is like to be me, nor do they have any knowledge of classical culture and how things are learned. Let me explain.

Let's say that I want to do some art or craft or sport. Drawing, writing, composing music. Or maybe computer programming or woodcarving or, for Ghod's sake, kayaking (which I would never do anyway, because it's dangerous and I hate water.) Well, it will be a long time before I ever get to do any recognizable example of that thing. Because the learning period will be long and difficult. And in the classical tradition, the apprentice (me) can do nothing on my own without passing the skill tests under the master's supervision.

So for art, for instance, I must go to art school for years and learn all the techniques needed to do art. Drawing, painting, perspective, color, composition, all of those things must be mastered before the prospective artist can create works of his/her own. I don't have much formal art education, which is a shame, and no doubt has seriously curtailed my professional life as an artist, but I have learned from other artists and from practicing by myself. I am entitled to do creative work of my own because I have done so much practice. Now, as I explained a few posts earlier, I am struggling to learn to draw human figures, a skill I did not do well. I will have to draw hundreds and hundreds of drawings before I feel qualified to re-incorporate human figures in my art work. If you know anything about drawing human figures, you may know that it is extremely difficult, and that the margin for error is very small. Any tiny mistake in drawing a figure, any little area of stiffness or wrong proportion or uncertain line, and your drawing is a loser.

Similarly, with music. In order to really do music, you cannot just sit down at the piano and improvise. I took piano lessons in my youth, and at no point did the piano teacher ever ask me to improvise anything. It was unthinkable. You learned piano (or any other instrument) by doing scales and arpeggios and more scales and then simple etudes and pieces written for training. And then only after that were you allowed to play anything by a known composer like Beethoven or Mozart, and even then only the simpler pieces, because you didn't have the skill to play anything else and you wouldn't for a long long time. As for understanding music, you had to take music theory for years, and learn harmony and counterpoint and fugues and other classical musical structures, before you would ever think to try to compose something of your own. I was privileged to take first year theory and counterpoint from a private tutor, but I never went on to the other years for various reasons. Therefore I am not entitled to do any musical composition of my own. As with drawing, the "music" produced by an untrained attempt at composition is easily identified as inferior. You cannot "break the rules" unless you know them and can work completely within those rules.

This has been my experience with math and physics as well. I know that there is interesting and creative work to be done in these fields, but I am lifetimes away from ever doing that. I have been studying math for 7 years now, and I am currently reviewing first year calculus. I had to start from middle-school arithmetic, back in 2001, and recapitulate my high school math for 5 of those years before I got anywhere near something that might have been taught me in college. And all these years, so far, all the math and physics I have ever done is training exercises, divorced from anything in the real world. I have never done a physics experiment nor done any mathematical "research," and I may never do so.

A couple of posts ago, I told you how difficult learning is for me. I am not being cute about this, and I'm not lying. In order for me to get anything through my obtuse and viscous brain, I have to go through a long, algorithmic series of small steps and problem sets. It takes me a whole year or more to just learn the basics. I cannot leap ahead, because I am scared and confused if I do that. I don't even turn the pages to the rest of the book, before it is time for me to work with them. This is how I learned Photoshop, and this is how I learned algebra, and this is how I am attempting to learn the music software on my computer ("GarageBand"), though knowing that any of my attempts to make "music" on this system will never meet "classical" standards. It will not be music.

This is why, when I long for a new skill or consider a creative possibility, I feel overwhelmed. There is no "just do it." There is no "try or not, there is no try" as the obnoxious Yoda sort of put it in one of those annoying Star Wars films. If I want to, for instance, learn computer programming, or even HTML (Web language, that is), I am facing years and years of step by step, tedious, repetitive learning and training before I ever do anything "real." I don't even know where to start. OK, where to start? Here's a giant book that weighs five pounds and has 1000 pages. Here's page 1. Work through the whole book, chapter by chapter, and I might know something elementary about the subject when I get to page 1000. Shall I start now? I might be finished with the book by 2010, if I apply myself diligently.

Posted at 2:33 am | link