Foreword

Let me begin with why this book exists and who I am holding in mind while I write it.

I am not holding the master in mind. The master does not need me. I am holding in mind the person who arrived with fire — who has been on fire about an art since childhood, and who is now standing at the door of that art, about to be handed to someone. A teacher, a school, a method, a system that will either walk them into the art and let them go, or keep them at the entrance until the fire goes out.

I am also holding in mind the person to whom this has already happened. Who had the fire, and was handed to the wrong keeper of it, and felt something go quiet that they have had no name for since. Who has perhaps found a name of their own for it: that the quiet was their own fault, that they simply had no talent after all. I do not believe most of them lacked talent. I believe many of them were trained by a method that did not fit them. And some were never allowed to move on to their own work, and went on copying long past the moment when that work should have begun, until the fire, still waiting for its turn, finally went out. That is a different case, and a much sadder one. It is not the student’s fault.

This book cannot give a quenched fire back. I say so on the very first page, because I cannot promise that. What it can do is something smaller, but worth doing. It can describe how the fire gets through — and how it goes out — so that one more person, somewhere, recognizes the moment when it comes and does not let the quiet win. If even a few fires stay lit that would otherwise have gone out, the book will have done its work.

I have tried several arts. In some of them, I stayed at the entrance and went on copying. So what follows is not a master’s wisdom. It is a map of wrong turns, drawn by someone who took most of them — a warning about where the road gives out, and a direction that feels right to me now. All of this is what I am handing over to you.

These are not lessons, then. They are a handful of stories, held up to the light one at a time. They are mine — not borrowed, not invented — and in them I am the student, not the master.

If you are the first of the two people I am writing for, I hope the book reaches you in time. If you are the second, I hope it hands you a truer name for what happened. It will not give you the fire back, but a truer name is worth more than it sounds.