"Vimla Patel and Guy Groen have explored the sociable expert by comparing the clinical skills of brilliant but novice medical students to doctors with several years of experience behind them. The experienced doctor, as one would expect, is a more accurate diagnostician. This is due in large part to the fact that he or she tends to be more open to oddity and particularity in patients, whereas the medical student is more likely to be a formalist, working by the book, rather rigidly applying general rules to particular cases. Moreover, the experienced doctor thinks in larger units of time, not just backward to cases in the past but, more interestingly, forward, trying to see into the patient's indeterminate future. The novice, lacking a storehouse of clinical histories, has trouble imagining what might be an individual patient's fate. The experienced doctor focuses on a patient's becoming; raw talent thinks strictly in terms of immediate cause and effect. The craftsman's capacity of prehension, discussed in our chapter on the hand, is thus elaborated in long term medical practice. Treating others as whole persons in time is one mark of sociable expertise."
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg. 247]
The importance of the sociable expert
Stoops, street life... and jazz
"On the steps of the tenements, the improvisers observe and experiment with stoops in relation to their own bodies. Like a jazz musician, a tenement dweller who improvises follows rules. The physical materials at hand in the street are givens, like the written melody of fundamental harmonies spelled out for each number in a jazz musician's "cheat book" (cheating because many of these songs are lifted illegally out of copyright). Good jazz improvisation follows rules of economy; variations pick out an element to explore, otherwise they lose focus; the harmonic reversals are disciplined by what came before. [...] Rudofsky thought that this hidden order is how most settlements of poor people develop and that the work of improvising street order attaches people to their communities, whereas "renewal" projects, which may provide a cleaner street, pretty houses, and large shops, give the inhabitants no way to mark their presence on the space."
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg. 236/237]
da sabedoria
"They're particularly fond of mental pleasures, which they consider of primary importance, and attribute mostly to good behaviour and a clear conscience. Their favourite physical pleasure is health. Of course, they believe in enjoying food, drink, and so forth, but purely in the interests of health, for they don't regard such things as very pleasant themselves — only as methods of resisting the stealthy onset of disease. A sensible person, they say, prefers keeping well to taking medicine, and would rather feel cheerful than have people trying to comfort him. On the same principle it's better not to need this type of pleasure than to become addicted to it. For, if you think that sort of thing will make you happy, you'll have to admit that your idea of perfect felicity would be a life consisting entirely of hunger, thirst, itching,eating, drinking, rubbing, and scratching — which would obviously be most unpleasant as well as quite disgusting. Undoubtedly these pleasures should come right at the bottom of the list, because they're so impure. "
Thomas More, in Utopia [pg 86]
Impaciência do Coração
Impaciência do Coração: Comportamento Humano Desviante e Justiça - Neste programa, Gabriela Moita conversa com o psicólogo Luís Fernandes.
Objectos transicionais e música. Removing the Suzuki tapes. When practicing becomes a narrative.
Os objectos transicionais e a aprendizagem musical.
Da importância da separação (insegurança) no processo da criatividade e do impulso para explorar territórios desconhecidos (D. W. Winnicott), tendo sempre, no horizonte, a certeza de que é sempre possível atingir uma perfeição. Ao percorrer esse, árduo, caminho desenvolve-se a expressão.
"Musically we need simply observe that believing in correctness in technique breeds expression. In music, this passage occurs when standards modulate from physical events like playing with a good tone to more aesthetic measures of, for instance, a well-shaped phrase. Of course, spontaneous discoveries and happy accident inform what a musical piece should sound like. Still the composer and the performer must have a criterion to make sense of happy accidents, to select some as happier than others. In developing technique, we resolve transitional objects into definitions, and we make decisions based on such definitions. "
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg. 159]
Of the value of things
In the meantime silver and gold, the raw materials of money, get no more respect from anyone than their intrinsic value deserves — which is obviously far less than that of iron. Without iron human life is simply impossible, just as it is without fire or water — but we could easily do without silver and gold, if it weren't for the idiotic concept of scarcity-value. And yet kind Mother Nature has deliberately placed all her greatest blessings, like earth, air, and water, right under our noses, and tucked away out of sight the things that are no use to us.
Thomas More, in Utopia [pg 70]
Pérolas a porcos...
"The craftsman is a more inclusive category than the artisan; he or she represents on each of us the desire to do something well, concretely, for its own sake. [...] but the reality on the ground is that people who aspire to be good craftsmen are depressed, ignored, or misunderstood by social institutions. [...] From the origins of classical civilization, craftsmen have suffered mistreatment. What has kept them going humanly is belief in their work and their involvement with its materials."
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pag 144]
Salutary failure
"Become an apprentice and produce bad results so as to be able to teach people how to produce good ones. Bad results will cause people to reason harder, and so improve. "
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg 96]
Compreender, é ser capaz de fazer
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| Glassblowing, illustration from the 'Encyclopedie des Sciences et Metiers' by Denis Diderot (1713-84) engraved by Robert Benard (fl.1734) published c.1770 |
The images, in other words, illuminate by clarifying and simplifying movement into a series of clear pictures of the sort the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called "decisive moments."
It might be possible to imagine an experience following this photographic procedure, one that enables our eyes to do the thinking about material things. In silence, as in a monastery, communication among people would be reduced to a minimum for the sake of contemplating how an object is made. Zen Buddhism follows this nonverbal path, taking the craftsman to be an emblematic figure who enlightens by showing rather than telling. Zen counsels that to understand the craft of archery you need not become an archer; instead, silently compose its decisive moments in your mind.
The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett [pg. 95]
Diderot's encyclopedia
"The Encyclopedia, or Dictionary of Arts and Crafts, edited principally by Denis Diderot [...] celebrated those who are committed to doing work well for its own sake; the craftsman stood out as the emblem of Enlightenment. "
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman
The master's tacit knowledge
"The most significant fact we know about Stradivari's workshop was that he was all over it, popping up unexpectedly everywhere, gathering in and processing those thousands of bits of information that could not signify in the same way to assistants who were doing just one part. The same thing has been true in scientific labs run by idiosyncratic geniuses; the master's head becomes stuffed with information only he or she can see the point of. This is why the secrets of the physicist Enrico Fermi as a great experimenter can't be fathomed by poring over the minutiae of his lab procedures.
To put this observation abstractly in a workshop where the master's individuality and distinctiveness dominates, tacit knowledge is also likely to dominate. Once the master dies, all the clues, moves, and insights he or she has gathered into the totality of the work cannot be reconstructed; there's no way to ask him or her to make the tacit explicit."
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman
Hands vs head
"The tactile, the relational, and the incomplete are physical experiences that occur in the act of drawing. Drawing stands for a larger range of experiences, such as the way of writing that embraces editing and rewriting, or of playing music to explore again and again the puzzling qualities of a particular chord. The difficult and the incomplete should be positive events in our understanding; they should stimulate us as simulation and facile manipulation of complete objects cannot."
Richard Sennett, in The Craftsman
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| Sketches by Renzo Piano |
O Doce Sabor do Mel
Há muito tempo atrás, um condenado a morte estava na prisão, aguardando o dia de sua execução. Um dia, ele resolveu fugir e, com muita dificuldade, conseguiu realizar seu objetivo. O rei do país, então, mandou um grande elefante em sua perseguição. A lei daquele país determinava que os fugitivos da cadeia fossem esmagados por um elefante. O fugitivo, sabendo que o elefante vinha em sua perseguição, corria com todas as suas forças.
Entretanto, o passo do animal era muito rápido e o fugitivo percebeu que não conseguiria escapar. Foi então que ele viu um grande poço. O fugitivo ficou aliviado: percebeu que se tratava de um excelente esconderijo e tratou de se esconder no interior do mesmo. Por um breve instante sentiu-se salvo, mas ao dirigir seu olhar para o fundo do poço, percebeu que lá se encontrava uma enorme serpente com a goela aberta, pronta para engoli-lo se ele caísse lá embaixo. Assustado, o fugitivo olhou em torno de si e viu que quatro serpentes venenosas estavam enrodilhadas nos cantos do poço, prontas para desferir um bote fatal sobre ele. O fugitivo percebeu, então, que aquele poço estava longe de proporcionar a sonhada segurança. Entretanto, não podia ele sair do mesmo, pois lá em cima permanecia o elefante alerta, pronto para esmagá-lo. O fugitivo sentiu que não tinha escapatória, mas, apostando na sorte pela última vez, agarrou-se a um cipó que crescia na parede do poço. Apavorado, segurava firmemente no cipó, seu último e frágil apoio. Foi então que ele percebeu a presença de dois ratinhos, um branco e um preto, que alternadamente iam roendo o cipó.
A cada roída o cipó ia ficando cada vez mais fino, a qualquer momento poderia rebentar e o homem cairia bem dentro da goela da serpente que o esperava lá embaixo.
O fugitivo sentiu que já estava morto. O pavor não o deixava um segundo sequer. Sentia ele que já estava no fim, que sua vida não valia mais nada. Foi então que, ao erguer os olhos para o alto, se deu conta de que uma frondosa árvore se erguia à beira do poço. Em um dos galhos da mesma havia uma colméia, da qual, a cada golpe de vento, caiam cinco gotas de mel bem dentro da boca aberta do homem. Aquele mel era realmente delicioso, sua doçura era comparável à do néctar, a sublime bebida dos deuses imortais. À medida que aquele mel delicioso refrescava sua garganta e aplacava sua sede, o fugitivo foi se esquecendo de sua situação. Chegou o momento em que ele perdeu totalmente a vontade de escapar daquele poço…
