Artist AND Grinder

Basically I think there are two aspects to playing go (I really mean for many games but I am on the go trip now so I will frame it that way). There is the artist and there is the grinder. The artist is the one who has interesting ideas and new ways of looking at old patterns. In some ways the artist is responsible for the deep meaning of a game. But the grinder is absolutely necessary. It is crucial to drill tactics and to play many games, to memorize opening sequences and stuff like that. The grinder is responsible for competence in a sense that is utterly alien to the artist.

So what I find is that the artist in many ways just wants to wing it in games. He just wants to try new things and experiment. This is totally great and valuable part of learning. The artist side can be great. But in some ways the artist side is just totally incompetent. Moments of genius are followed by howlers. (This is kind of what I was talking about in a previous post when I was talking about the importance of the follow up and a mediocre move with a solid follow up is better than a great move with a bad follow up).

But the grinder is good at building that competence. The grinder is willing to grind tactics problems to get better. But the downside of the grinder is that in some ways when I follow that, the game loses meaning and just gets into dry, repetitive, boring, mechanism.

The problem for me in the past is that I have kind of had a bad pattern that when I would feel the need of one or the other it would come with condemnation of the other. So when I got burned out on repetitiveness or the meaningless of studying openings I would blame that whole way of approaching the game. And the same thing on the flipside. When I would lose a game on a blunder or because of something mechanical I would blame my incompetence on a kind of whimsical nature that doesn’t get down to brass tacks.

So my kind of realization recently has just been clearly seeing things in terms of these two characters and seeing that I need them to cooperate and harmonize rather than squabbling.

But another dimension of this insight is that it also plays out in my day to day life. There is a grinder who gets up and goes to work and there is an artist who wants to chase butterflies and rebels at having to do stuff.

There is a further twist though that I feel like growing up my parents were profoundly neglectful of the grinder side. I think that is a big reason why I have been fascinated my whole life by things like math, logic, and chess and go. These are places where the grinder is absolutely necessary. My parents did model some of the grinder in that they were responsible adults who got up and went to work. But they totally failed to teach me the practical aspects of getting stuff done and being responsible. They left me to my own devices a lot and as a result I have had lifelong problems with performing consistently or responsibly.

So I feel like although my parents (particularly my mom) cultivated my artistic side, they did so in a way that neglected practical skills even for writing or art. Like I say, I feel like this has a lot to do with why I have sought out more grinder dependent activities because that is a crucial part of life and in fact of any endeavor that I just didn’t get.

But in some ways although I sought out the grinder it was something I didn’t know how to integrate. So I tend to go to excess. I either value the grinder too much and disdain the artist as living in cloud cuckoo land or I want to throw everything over and rush to embrace meaning and artistry without the tools to actually reach the depths.

So, somehow I think this is kind of an important aspect of life but also particularly of games. Basically seeking out a way of integrating these two things so that life doesn’t feel like a dull meaningless grind, but on the other hand learning to perform responsibly so I am not always having to clean up major messes brought on by my inability to perform consistently.

There are two other aspects I want to touch on. One is the emotional side of go and the other is the idea of focus vs seeking inspiration elsewhere.

In terms of emotional aspects, I feel like the artist is responsible for big swings. The artist gets fired up with passion and excitement. But on the other hand, the artist can take losses so painfully that he doesn’t want to play for risk of feeling so bad. The grinder is in some ways much lighter emotionally. The grinder is able to see that a loss is just a step on the path. The grinder doesn’t have the same intense perfectionism. It is kind of a “good enough” mentality. Again, both are valuable. If losses aren’t painful at all then in some ways the depths of the game are lost. (I am reminded of the end of Kawabata’s “Master of Go” where he plays a westerner on a train and the westerner loses game after game but just wants to keep playing. Kawabata turns it into a racial thing that says this is why westerners will never get the spirit of go.) But at the same time, building competence necessarily involves treating losses lightly and just keep hitting the bag.

The other issue is this issue of like focus vs outside things. This is another thing that has been profoundly problematic for me. My whole life I have craved some kind of deep competence at something. I think this is another reason why things like chess and go resonate with me. It is because there is a really clear sense of competence involved in these games that is measurable with a rating or ranking. Art is really messy, particularly modern art where a lot of the traditional hallmarks of competetence were thrown overboard. But competence involves focusing on something and practicing and like consistently building skills over long time periods. That is something it is very difficult for me to do. There is just this part of me that always ends up wanting to chase random butterflies and so I will I will pick something up and get enthusiastic and passionate but ultimately it is kind of an empty or shallow kind of passion because it tends to wilt as soon as it becomes clear that hard work is involved so then the grass will seem greener elsewhere. So this is the profound problem. I feel like my grinder side really wants consistency and like long-term focus because that kind of competence feels profoundly important. But the artist side needs variety and like other stuff. But the artist side tends to get fascinated with each new thing and to pull me away from what I have set out to do because that old things starts to feel dull and lifeless. So in some ways I have overcorrected on either side. At times I have tried to eliminate all outside influences so I could focus and develop the basic skills. But then in some ways I have gone to the opposite extreme and chased variety and perpetually shifting enthusiasms. The problem is that both of these extremes are profoundly meaninglesss and despair inducing. So it is really difficult to find a way to stay on topic with something such as go so that I can actually practice enough and like learn enough to develop that competence while at the same time giving my artist room to breathe and a variety of influences that will drive inspiration without constantly being pulled away from whatever I was last doing.

I guess I touched on it briefly but in some ways I guess I would say that my answer to the problem of meaning is developing something. Investing in some kind of project. The meaning isn’t inherent in the project but comes from the care and attention and practice you put into the project. You develop the meaning as you go along. This true of almost any art or craft. But again, I insist that both the grinder and the artist are crucial to the development of meaning.