Wandering into a book about Miles Davis, I found one entry : Enigmas. As a director, he indeed oftenly told strange phrases to the musicians he was playing with.
He quickly told, during a concert, “Don’t play the butter notes” to Herbie Hancock, who had to guess what it was about. To forget the fat, the obvious notes, play dry?…
But also “Implicit in Davis’s advice is the counterintuitive idea that having fewer options actually expands the creative possibilities available to a musician, because you have to work extra hard to make up for the absent notes.”
Therefore : a more aerial game AND creativity triggering, from and after a five words injunction!
So I think about Pina Bausch telling “I chose you for your weaknesses” to a tough dancer, as an enigma, which totally unblocked the dancer.
There’s one tool here, for team managers, who need :
Analysis or Vision? Logic or Instinct? It’s up to you…
This leads me to an end : Message Addressees.
To click on enigmatic messages, to understand a koan, to dismantle a manipulator‘s discourse, you have to think, you need to be trained.
If you’re a fast thinker like Herbie Hancock, you accept the good idea, you understand it and apply it with your possibilities and your will. As if someone showed you a window. Let’s jump through it!
Negatively? Toxic communicators and bad managers will often try to define you, to put you down, to trick you with paradoxes, injunctions or enigmatic assertions. If you’re aware of it, you’ll have fun dismantling all these processes at fast pace, clipping along the suite of sentences and putting the dead bones on your wooden desk : Ok this, then that, and oh this too…
Then you do what you have to do.
Now I think about strange movies like Fight Club (Fincher) or Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick), which have the capacity to bore the bored, and to activate some others…
Conclusion : Enigmas, good or bad, are good for thinkers!
Have a nice day!
“The very activity of seeking an answer”
Instagram : hornsarahberlin
KOAN : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dan
“A kōan is a story, dialogue, question, or statement, which is used in Zen practice to provoke the “great doubt” and test a student’s progress in Zen practice”.
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