Tabs Issue 75: The onion in the varnish
One night during Thanksgiving break of senior year of college, in a room with deep plush couches, we were at Kelly’s friend’s house meowing/screeching with fervor to “Hey Jude” as Sean played the song on the piano. He played with feeling and with freedom. We were out of breath when the song ended and I felt slightly euphoric.1 Like my grandpa, Sean could sit down at the piano and just play. Remember a tune from years ago or pick one out or invent it. The instrument obeyed.
This ease was the opposite of my relationship with the piano, which I had played for ten years under my grandmother’s exacting guidance. I played many pieces and practiced almost everyday and I have a good memory, but I knew during recitals that if I forgot a note, I would be lost. I would have to restart from the part I still remembered and hope that my hands would guide me out of trouble. The issue was rooted in the fact that I never properly learned the interrelation of the chords and harmonies. My memory could see me through a piece, but my piano playing was not founded in understanding theory, and this ignorance is fatal to improvisation, which is the cornerstone of mastery. Of course when you’re talented, you might figure out theory on your own without ever articulating it even to yourself, but it is transparent to you regardless. People hear that I played piano for ten years and think it means I’m good at it, but I can’t play anything unless I have sheet music in front of me. I feel largely useless sitting at the piano.
The same issue plagued my relationship with math. If you don’t understand the proof and the purpose of the formula, the formula itself won’t take you very far. You will be able to solve problems where the variables correspond exactly to the formula, and that’s enough for a B on a test, but it won’t take you far. Formulas help you get started, but they keep you tethered to the same spot if they are not underpinned by understanding of what they represent, in which case they are building blocks to reach greater heights. I was a slave to dressing recipes, absolutely paralyzed when I had to make a salad, and then Kelly told me it was a combination of fat, acid, and salt, and then a whole world of combinations opened itself up before me. I still just make the same standard vinaigrette, but I know I could make more! Formulas are tools for thinking and exploration, not replacements for thought itself. You have to know the why.
A July issue of Scope of Work opened with an anecdote from Primo Levi’s memoir. Levi recounts working at a paint factory and coming across a formula for paint varnish that directed the maker to add two slices of onion to boiling linseed oil near the end of the process. Turns out, the onions were included in the recipe at a time when thermometers weren’t common and were used as a temperature gauge. The onion remained nonetheless. “What had been a crude measuring operation had lost its significance and was transformed into a mysterious and magical practice.” The lesson for some is that you should interrogate the things whose purpose you don’t understand to determine if they’re still necessary (a kind of opposing corollary to this is Chesterton’s fence: don’t destroy what you don’t understand). But to me what this anecdote illustrates is how a recipe or formula by itself only communicates that something works but doesn’t explain why: it leaves things mysterious. One definition of magic would be “that whose mechanisms are unknown.”
So my relationship with math and the piano is very onion in the varnish. And I envy those whose profound understanding (of the kind where you might even be unable to explain something to someone else because it is so obvious: the stuff of terrible teachers) allow them to feel free at the piano or faced with a math problem. I feel that way when I’m writing an essay: I wonder, where will this thought take me? What others ideas will it connect to? It is not a burden or an antagonist, it is a field of possibility and play. So it is with a dancer and the stage, an athlete with the field and both of them with their bodies. A craftsman and the material she works with, a physicist and the laws he uses to theorize, a chef and her ingredients, an artist and his medium, you and anything you are “good at.” For to be “good at” something is to feel you can roam within it; it is something in which exploration and play and surprise are possible and evident. Maybe you’re not the best at it, though. Maybe you’re not even that good at it. But maybe it makes you feel free.
