Mastering It: Adam Gopnik on the art of being perfectly imperfect | Canada Voices

Today we kick off Mastering It, a summer series to introduce you to Canadians who have sought to rise above being simply good at their chosen endeavour – people who, by perfecting their skill, strive to become the best. But first, we explore the complicated and often paradoxical nature of mastery itself.

Some truths about mastery seem permanently, irrevocably true. All tasks, it seems, even the most resistant, eventually surrender to two forces: first the force of reduction, breaking down a complicated task into its smaller parts, and then the sheer force of perseverance in reassembling them – in mastering the smaller parts, however awkwardly, until they begin at last to turn into a seamless-seeming sequence.

The steps of the ballroom foxtrot, the series of blows in a boxing drill and the verbs of a foreign language are equally susceptible to the power of passionate perseverance. First to stumble, then to step, and then at last to dance, as the poet Louis MacNeice puts it perfectly.

The reward we get is less the mastery, in the sense of virtuosic superiority – that’s given only to a few – but the loss of ourselves in the flow of the action. The rewards of other people’s admiration are real, but, as everyone knows, short-lived: there is always someone who can do it better.

But no happiness is as real, as the mystics have long told us, as the loss of ourselves in some activity that enfolds us within it. It can be playing guitar or staring at our own navel, but we need to escape ourselves in order to become ourselves. There are many drugs that we can inject into our veins that get us high, but only one drug that our brains supply to get us higher – the beautiful self-induced absorption in a task.

Seeking mastery for its own sake, we naturally want to get better and better at whatever we’re pursuing – we want to play the chord or throw the jab perfectly, and sometimes we almost do. What is missing from this story is the paradoxical seeming but essential role of imperfection in pursuing, and achieving, the mastery we hope will be compelling to us and others.

For in truth, as I discovered when I was reporting my book, The Real Work: On The Mystery of Mastery, the mastery we love most always involves imperfect performance.

The neuro-scientist Daniel Levitin once famously studied the nature of expression in music. Using a Yamaha Disklavier that can record the precise fingering and pressure of a pianist, and then play it back, Mr. Levitin and his team at McGill University had a professional pianist play Chopin into it, and then laboriously spoon-fed the expressive dimensions, the “phrasings,” into a computer program, registering how hard the pianist pressed down on the keys, and then how much she varied speeds within a fixed rhythm. Then they taught the computer to intensify or minimize those variables – to play versions of the same Chopin piece with much more variation within the tempo, or much less, with more variations within the volume of notes, or much less.

It turned out, not surprisingly, that people sought out an optimal middle of expressiveness; they liked the Chopin the way the pianist had played it, with enough rubato and musical italicizing to indicate the presence of a player, a human hand, but not so much that it all became randomized mush. That shouldn’t really be surprising. We prefer a touch of vibrato in a singer’s voice to the full Kate Smith tremolo. We like a pianist who, as the phrase so rightly has it, tickles the keys, and dislike one who bangs them without variation. We love the signs of human presence, the anti-mechanical touch.

But our taste for imperfection, matched to mastery, goes still further. One sees this best in contemporary spectator sports. On one axis, of technical perfection, winning strategies in our favorite sports are much better analyzed and understood than they have ever been before; on another axis, of experience, they have never been duller as a consequence.

In baseball, the analytic revolution begun by Bill James in the eighties, first as an amateur enthusiast’s preoccupation, has now overtaken and transformed the game. All of the classic small-ball strategies that delighted connoisseurs – the suicide squeeze, the stolen base, the hit-and-run, the well-executed bunt – have been shown to be inefficiencies, largely irrelevant to the art of winning baseball games, which happens by hitting home runs and by never wasting outs.

And so, the game has become, ever more often, a confrontation between a hard-throwing pitcher and a hard-swinging batter – ever more perfect and ever more predictable.

Certainly, in hockey, despite the incomparably larger population of brilliant Finnish and Russian and even German players that we can now draw on, the quality of the game has become duller and more repetitive now than ever before.

Nor is this my idiosyncratic belief.

Ken Dryden – the Hall of Fame goaltender – wrote a long piece not long ago explaining that, because the position of goalie had been “solved” by ever-better equipment and ever-better technique – by bigger pads and by the “butterfly” style – it had essentially made the net impenetrable. And so, the game has become what it often now is: a puck battle along the boards, a shot from the point, a rebound, and everyone rushing the goal crease after.

“For shooters and coaches, that is the strategy,” Dryden wrote. “Rush the net with multiple offensive players, multiple defensive players will go with them, multiple arms, legs, and bodies will jostle in front of the goalie, and the remaining shooters, distant from the net, will fire away hoping to thread the needle.”

Here is, in other words, a further paradox of perfection: the players are more skilled, the techniques are more elaborate, the quality of play in a real sense higher. But the game is not merely mechanical and duller – which it is – it is less varied, less interesting, less pregnant with the sudden possibility of inspired solution.

In the classic hockey confrontation, the winger – Guy Lafleur or Frank Mahovlich – races down the wing to confront the goaltender. Both players have a variety of choices that they have to make instantly: for the goaltender, to come out or stay back, and for the shooter, to use a slap shot, a wrist shot or deke around the remaining defender.

These options are now largely foreclosed.

The defenceman from Finland or Sweden is too quick to be deked; the goalie knows to always stays back on his line, making himself impenetrable. The best solution is the least creative: fire, hope for a rebound and run the goalie. (This year’s Stanley Cup final, though exciting, was also proof of this truth: an awful lot of sheer dumb physical banging in and around the goal, only occasionally interrupted by grace, or McDavid.)

As is so often the case, stage magicians, with their narrow but exquisite focus on technique – “In other arts technique can be transparent; only in magic does it have to be invisible,” one master magician once said – have much to teach us here.

For almost a century, magicians have struggled to understand the perfection of imperfection as they debated what they call “too-perfect trick theory.” This is the understanding that a perfectly executed trick is not only dull but, paradoxically, more obvious than an imperfectly executed technique.

First articulated in conversation by the legendary Dai Vernon and formalized by the illusionist Rick Johnsson in a 1971 article, the Too Perfect theory says, basically, that any trick that simply astounds will give itself away. If, for instance, a magician smokes a cigarette and then makes it pass through an ordinary quarter, the only reasonable explanation is that it isn’t an ordinary quarter; the spectator will immediately know that it’s a trick quarter, with a hinge.

What makes a trick work is not the inherent astoundingness of its effect but the magician’s ability to suggest any number of possible explanations, none of them conclusive, and none of them quite obvious.

Two ways of avoiding a too-perfect trick, for instance, lie in either “reducing the claim” or “raising the proof.” Reducing the claim means roughing up the illusion so that the spectator isn’t even sure she saw one – bringing the cigarette in and out of the coin so quickly that the viewer doesn’t know if the trick is in the coin or in her eyes. Raising the proof might mean multiplying the possible explanations, in a card-guessing trick, by going through an elaborate charade of reading the spectator’s face and voice – so that, when the forced card is guessed, the obviousness of the trick is, well, obviated. Too many doors have been opened to see only one.

At the heart of the Too Perfect theory is the insight that art works best when the illusions it creates are open-ended enough to invite the viewer into a credibly imperfect world. Magic is the dramatization of explanation more than it is the engineering of effects. Too Perfect theory helps explain why people are more convinced by an imperfect, distressed illusion than by a perfectly realized one. The theory explains the force of the seemingly off-story scene in a film, the power of elliptical dialogue in the theatre, the constant artistic need to turn away from apparent perfection toward the laconic or unfixed. Illusion affects us only when it is incomplete.

Which returns us to the power of the vibrato and legato, of the voice that shakes and the phrasing that goes off-tempo from the meter. They affect us not merely because they are fetchingly imperfect but because they are humanly imperfect. What we want from performers of every kind is not simply to be impressed but to be engaged, and we are engaged when we feel that we are within an empathetic act of two-sided communication. It’s what we mean when we say that a great singer, even a seemingly unskilled one, like Leonard Cohen, is singing to us; of course he isn’t, and yet somehow, he is.

And here we come to a further paradox in which I participate every day. I spend my life writing; writing is my life. I write four hours a day every day, Christmas and Thanksgiving included. I try every day to write better than I did the day before. But of what does my struggle to write better consist? Why, of an effort to unedify myself, to find ever new ways of producing on the page the realized sound of a person, not of a pundit or professor.

I learn to vary eloquence with deliberate awkwardness, to rough it up; to indulge digression, permit a parentheses, employ the ironic aside – to confront long and poetic phrases with short and pithy ones, to use a vulgar word right after an eloquent conceit, and to always end on a ‘drop shot,’ a monosyllabic sentence that sums up, sometimes with the deliberate appearance of stupidity, what has been said before at eloquent length. If you want to land a trick point, you have to land it plain at the end.

The contemplation of the paradoxes of perfection may help lead to a larger necessary leap – I mean the vital leap from “human” to “humanism,” from the effect of the human presence in performance, which has been available since the dawn of time, to the elevation of that presence into a moral ideal.

The warbling voice in folk song; the deliberately “broken” hand of the Asian painter, using partial hints of landscape to invite the beholder to complete the image in ways more compelling than detailed rendering can supply; the perpetual taste for the enigmatic and inexplicable in poetry; even, for connoisseurs of “the sweet science,” the way that a great boxer first perfects his defence and then accommodates furiously to the advantageous moments – witnessing any of these displays of the impressive and improvisational, mixed together, reminds us of our own mixed-up humanity. We want virtuosity, certainly, but we want it inflected with vulnerability.

We can even extend this truth to a broader social realm. For perhaps it is here that performance practice and political philosophy meet – for are not humanism and imperfectionism simply the same thing seen at different moments?

Surely what the soprano’s vibrato teaches us, what too-perfect trick theory teaches us, what Ken Dryden teaches us, what Bill James teaches us, is to be wary of all programs of perfectibility. They always disappoint us in the end, and is this not as true of the nationalist impulse to follow the perfect charismatic leader who can do no wrong in his follower’s eyes, as it is of the idea that some blueprint exists that, if followed fanatically enough, can make a better world?

Both rest on ideals of perfection that can lead us only, in the performing arts, to tedium, and in our social life, to terror. Balancing our appetite for mastery with our knowledge that our humanity depends on its partial negation – that’s where the real, and hardest, work happens.