Stephen Nachmanovitch

Improvisation: The Twists and Turns in Free-Association

The improvisational process means thinking as nature thinks.

Posted 7/8/20

The Art of Is

“Unpremeditated music is the true gauge which
measures the current of our thoughts, the very
undertow of our life's stream.”
—Henry David Thoreau

Sing O Muse of whatever comes to mind. Begin anywhere and follow the flow. There's no telling where you might be swept off to.

The improvisational process is rooted in free association — and the near guarantee that after a while, free association will turn up significant patterns. Even the most trivial thoughts can lead to a network of connections. The first gesture, sound, word, brushstroke, or thought may seem arbitrary, but it reminds you of this; this suggests that; that suggests the next thing. The pieces start fitting together. After a period of wandering, you may find yourself standing in a strange place that turns out to be your ancestral homeland — to encounter your original nature and know it for the first time.

Freud developed this simple and childish game into a tool of great power and elegance. In the free play of words, thoughts, feelings, and images, we need not be looking for repressed memories, for answers to life's conundrums, or for great art; we can allow spontaneous answers to take us someplace meaningful. The "free" of free association does not mean wild or random but free of deliberate purpose. No association is free of context and meaning, but it may reveal deeper truth if it is free of conscious (and often fearful) control.

As a teenager Freud was influenced by the essays of Ludwig Borne (born Loeb Baruch, 1786-1837), especially an essay called "The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days." Borne suggests, "Take a stack of paper and write. Write everything that goes through your mind for three consecutive days with neither hesitation nor hypocrisy. Write down what you think of yourself, of the Turkish war, of Goethe, of a criminal case, of the Last Judgment, of your boss — and when the three days are over you will be amazed at what novel and startling thoughts have spilled out of you."

This prescription for spontaneous prose (prefiguring Baudelaire, Breton, Ginsberg, ruth weiss, Dorothea Brande, and many others) is not automatic writing, which is supposedly dictation from spirits, but dictation from ourselves: our own spirit. Write, noodle on a musical instrument or toy, doodle on the piece of paper until it gives up its secrets. You can refine it later. The output may not be something you want to share publicly (the delete button and the trash can are always available), but once unblocked you can start your journey in earnest.

Borne wrote, "To do this there is nothing one needs to learn, only much one needs to unlearn." And, "A shameful and cowardly fear of thinking holds every one of us back."

Free Association

Methought I was enamored of an ass.
—Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Free association is also free ass: you are free to make an ass of yourself. If I'm afraid of this freedom, I won't get up in the morning because I am sure to make an ass of myself at least a few times a day. Onstage and performing improvised music, the risk is nothing compared with my fumbles and mistakes in everyday life. Improvising thrives on our imperfection and how we integrate it into the flow of our activity.

Everyone has problems, everyone is a mystery to him- or herself, everyone at some point begins to explore mind and feelings and relationships in some way, attempting to see the patterns that got us where we are. "I come," Blake wrote, "to cleanse the Face of my Spirit by Self-examination." By giving ourselves a space in which to slough off the veneer of perfection or professionalism, we can reach our next evolutionary step.

Freedom to make an ass of yourself might mean that your improvisation goes nowhere. It might peter out or go around in circles. In the creative context, as in the therapeutic one, it might mean bringing up awkward or humiliating material. We may feel that we are wasting our time with the music that wanders, the writing that no one will ever see, the drawing that we crumple up and throw away — but without these episodes we would never produce anything of quality. Vulnerability is a precondition of creative work.

Our age is seeking a new spring of life.
I found one and drank of it and the water tasted good.
—C.G. Jung

Journeys may start with free association, but they don't end that way. We discover a direction and follow it. We draw, write, paint, sing our way into clarity, into connections to other people, into the workings of nature. Themes of which we had long been unconscious gradually come into focus, like islands emerging in the distance.

Carl Jung, after his break with Freud, extended the practice of free association to include hands-on modes of artistic creation. He called his method active imagination, allowing ideas and correlations to take tangible shape through visualization. For Jung, the practice took the form of painting and writing; for other people, it takes the form of music, theater, crafts, tinkering with technologies and expressive arts of all sorts, old and new.

Freud's free association is a mode of mental-verbal exploration. Jung's active imagination is a concrete mode of doing, making, creating. His was an enterprise of knowing the self in order to transcend it. It is a journey of revelation: uncovering patterns within and around us that cannot be seen or even known until we manifest them. "The patient can make himself creatively independent through this method. He is no longer dependent on his dreams or on his doctor's knowledge; instead, by painting himself he gives shape to himself."

In his own life Jung practiced this method of exploration in his massive work of fantasy, myth, painting, and calligraphy. The Red Book, created during World War I, is an illuminated manuscript that looks like it tunneled here straight from the Middle Ages. The Red Book was known about for decades but only published fifty years after Jung's death.

While leading a busy life practicing psychiatry, training analysts from around the world, and writing books, Jung managed to devote years to the arts of building, stonemasonry, and carving. Over decades he built a stone house with four towers at Bollingen on the shore of Lake Zurich, like a structure out of ancient times, new wings added as he discovered new patterns in his own personality, externalizing them in stone, in the form of alchemical carvings and other psychic symbols. On his seventy-fifth birthday in 1950, Jung made his way down to the lake, and with his wrinkled hands chiseled into the rock a fragment from Heraclitus: "Time is a child at play, gambling; a child's is the kingship."

Craftsmanship elevating personal evolution to a universal scale is also reflected in the dreamlike Watts Towers in Los Angeles, Nuestro Pueblo, seventeen enormous spirals stretching skyward, covered with mosaics made mostly from what had been trash, hand-built by Simon Rodia from 1921 to 1954. This was not practical, it was not economical. But it was the expression and discovery of life, and without that, what is there, mere survival?

An image pulls us into an interconnected network of patterns. Suddenly a fresh universe of thought and feeling is born. Curiosity and wonder motivate us to persevere. These pathways become a portal into Indra's net: the jeweled lattice of interrelations that encompasses the cosmos but is reflected from myriad points of perception.

Free association is the booster rocket, allowing us to attain escape velocity. But with active imagination, we eventually find ourselves gravitating elsewhere, to a center that draws us in, and we start firing thrusters to navigate toward that place and explore it.

The work of active imagination allows us to bridge the gaps between conscious and unconscious, logic and fantasy. It opens pathways to collective patterns we share with other people. Follow impulse in creative expression, see where it leads, let images unfold into an extended drama. We go from island hopping to pursuing a story with a shape. We find our unique linkage to nature, culture, and psyche.

Improvising is inductive. Whether a monologue or a conversation with partners, it moves in time from tone to tone, word to word, form to form. Looking back at the improvisation, we feel the inevitability of the pattern as though it were intentional. In collective improvising or conversation, the inductive paths of two or more people thread around each other like strands of a double helix, open-ended and relational, mutually reinforcing and contrasting. Thus we follow the poetic process of research by which links are tracked, threads woven, as in Blake:

I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball:
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate,
Built in Jerusalem's wall.

Jung knew his paintings were not "art" in the normal sense but a vehicle for investigation. He discovered that as he relentlessly excavated into the most deeply personal material, he began to identify archetypes, universal patterns shared among many cultures. Paradoxically, the deeper we venture into the roots of the self, the closer we come to transcending our self-centeredness, precisely because what we discover is how inseparable we are from the total structure of being.

In ancient times people described certain experiences as visits from gods and goddesses. In The Odyssey the goddess Athena appears to young Telemachus disguised as an older man named Mentor, his father's friend, to guide and help him. The same goddess whispers words into the ear of his long-missing father, Odysseus, on his ten-year journey home. Athena is the voice of inspiration; without her mastery and cleverness at devising tactics, Odysseus would never have taken back his home. Thus we now speak of having a mentor, an adviser, one who has taken particular interest in our story, in guiding us through our unique journey.

Odysseus's intention was simple: sail back to his family when the Trojan War was over. He had the goal, the ships, the men: it was supposed to take a couple of weeks. But it took ten extra years. If he had carried out his plan successfully, no one would be telling his story three thousand years later. Our purposes are one thing; our actual adventures are something else entirely.

Take a walk, anywhere. One step at a time, finding out where you are going by going there. Be led by a dog into a forest. He drags you along hard, and you go where his nose goes. Get lost in the middle of the road of life (Dante) and make underground and supernal discoveries; be blown off course by an angry god (Odysseus), or simply wander down the ordinary streets of your middle-class city (Leopold Bloom), and unforeseeable connections will spring up and surround you.

Our explorations take on the character of a journey to strange parts, which becomes a journey home. "I give you the end of a golden string, only wind it into a ball..." Golden strings of association, threads of awareness, spin themselves into stories. Spin strands into yarns, yarn into multidimensional patterns, like Bach's Chaconne. This monumental work for solo violin is often experienced as a journey there and back again. A motif of four descending tones, three beats each, repeating over and over with sixty-four variations, that's all it is, but it takes us through myriad territories, wild, exuberant, terrifying, joyful, excavating under the earth, soaring, and finally, repeating the initial theme, with a depth that can only be understood through the journey itself, all to a steady, slow pulse.

Penelope spends three years weaving and unweaving, weaving and unweaving a shroud for her father-in-law, spinning a lie to deceive the suitors, to string them along and save herself. Scheherazade jumps from story to story for a thousand and one nights to save herself, stitching the strands of one into the next. We pick up the tools of our chosen art and shape tones and syllables into an unfolding plot. The string is spun out in time as a linear sequence, but in retrospect it feels inevitable.

We mischaracterize the act of finding pattern in seemingly separate facts as "connecting the dots." That metaphor implies that facts are separate entities, dots that stay still on a page. But each event is a wriggling thread of interactivity in spacetime, with its own past, present, and future. We spin them, or watch them spin themselves, into patterns that cannot be predicted.

Improvising is not "just" fantasy and imagination; it is what happens when our intentions meet the real world, with all its unpredictability. We smack into the limitations of materials and our abilities to manipulate those materials, the limitations of our relationships with other people, our collaborators or our opponents. Then what do we do? How do we pick ourselves up, change our shape, learn to do new or old tricks?

Homer gave us Odysseus, "the master improviser," "man of twists and turns," wearing countless costumes and shapes as he seeks to merge back into the simple life he once had. Though he arrives at his destination and reclaims his home, we speak of an odyssey as the journey itself, not as reaching a goal. We still follow his wanderings over the swarming sea, making up lies and stories to save his skin and cover his tracks, yarns that are still retold with pleasure three millennia later.

Improvisational actor, his wily wife and son actors too, imagination guided by a gray-eyed goddess wearing the body and bearing the voice of a man called Mentor.

Stephen Nachmanovitch is the author of The Art of Is and Free Play. He performs and teaches internationally as an improvisational violinist and lecturer. more

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