Last night I nerded out at AWE-MAGEDDON*, a live event series put on by my favorite WNYC podcast, Radiolab. The show featured Brooklyn-based duo Buke and Gass, creating the sound of five musicians on their homemade baritone ukelele and guitar-bass hybrid — as well as robotics engineer Hod Lipson, whose work in evolutionary robotics involves creating machines that can adapt and demonstrate elements of human creativity (and take over the world…?). Nerd central!

Professor Lipson introduced us to one of his four-legged creations that has been charged with the instruction to move forward. But this robot does not know that it is four-legged. It does not know anything about its nature, in fact; it will create a computer simulation of its sensory input as it exists in the world, and then figure out how to walk from that simulation. Lipson tells us that the robot starts by making a random motion, assessing the sensory input that it receives from that motion, and then it begins hypothesizing as to what its shape and form might be.

Here’s where it gets interesting (as if it weren’t already). To test the hypotheses, Lipson says, the robot starts looking for “the most disagreement”. It tries movements specifically to rule out one possibility or another. It tips and tilts and tries to throw itself off its axis, because that will give it unequivocal information about what it is and what will or will not work. It looks, in other words, for failure — because that is the fastest way to learn.

There is a lot of lipservice paid to failure — don’t we all know by now that you learn more from your failures than your successes, and everyone falls down a few times on the way to the top? But – and maybe it’s just perfectionists like me – but I don’t think too many of us go LOOKING for failure.

I certainly hope it’s true that machines will never be able to embody the human creative spirit, our ephemeral impulses and nuances and subtleties. But maybe there is something to learn from this non-human creation, with no emotions and no attachments and no desires, and no need to have great PR.

Because it is entirely possible that the fastest and most useful information about my nature; about what and who I am; about how to move forward… could all be found by throwing myself off the cliff and hoping for an EPIC FAIL.

*You can watch the event webcast here!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this Zen proverb – quite the truism, as continues to be revealed to me.

Though I like this phrasing of it the best, it has made its way mainstream in such cliches as “what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger” (a bit testosterone-charged) or what I once saw on a greeting card: “a strong woman is like a teabag: you don’t know what she’s made of until she gets into hot water” (…gag). Or, as one of my acting teachers once said, “We never really get rid of our problems; we just become better friends with them.”

Last week I was out to dinner with a good friend, a former stage manager who is married to an actor. She was telling me about her husband’s recent success booking a commercial because of his culinary skills (and the reek of onions as he practiced chopping, slicing & dicing for the audition). “How ironic,” she said, “that his survival job is what got him this breakthrough.”

But I’m not sure I find it ironic at all. In a very real way, it is our challenges that define us and shape us into the people we will become — largely because we must change and grow in order to overcome them.

Sometimes I wonder (wistfully) what it would be like to not be so highly intelligent, especially as an artist. I say this not as any sort of bragging right — there are many, many times when I don’t want to be analyzing things on six different levels at once; when thinking is not the best solution to the matter at hand; when I wish my brain came with an on/off switch, or at least a dimmer. Pretty much any time during the artistic process, in fact. There’s a reason I’ve never been terribly gifted at improv.

And yet, my intelligence is a major part of what makes me who I am, rather than who I might wish I were… and it’s not an asset I feel like throwing away!

Lately I seem to be riding a wave of what I hope will smooth out into a more integrated existence. I’m jaggedly emotional, continually surprised by outbursts of laughter and anger, crying to friends over beers, but I’m not entirely sure just why. I do know – on the gut level – why can’t there be two different words for intellectual knowing and intuitive knowing? – that the answer is not going to be found by thinking it through.

So instead I am living it through. This obstacle IS my path, and I know not where it leads…

I’m on the train with Somerset Maugham again (on now to another of the nine novels, this time Of Human Bondage) when we chance to meet a new character who thinks of our hero as supercilious. (He couldn’t be more wrong, but then, such are the hazards of judging other people.) Anyway, this is one of those words I tend to soldier through each time I come across it, thinking I have enough of an idea of what it means that I can get by without picking up a dictionary. Context clues, anyone? But now that I can move my Kindle cursor right to it and have the definition just appear… well, an entire new vocabulary is at my disposal.

Did you know that supercilious (which, by the way, is defined as “behaving or looking as though one thinks one is superior to others”) comes from the Latin word superciliosus (“haughty”), which is from supercilium — “EYEBROW” ?!

I love stuff like this. Talk about human behavior. I think from now on I’ll just start referring to snobby people as eyebrow-y.

The Fabulous Lunts: A Biography of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne

Studs Terkel has given way to a similar work that has been gathering dust on my shelf for awhile: a hefty biography of the Lunts.

I should probably put this confession right out there: I have something of a Lunt-adoration complex. When Ten Chimneys (their Genesee Depot, WI home, not far from where I grew up) opened to the public for tours in 2003, I went for a visit. The docents told stories of Noel Coward relaxing in the pool and Katharine Hepburn driving up WI-83 (I picture her in a convertible with a scarf around her hair, big sunglasses, and a smile). They showed us Alfred’s kitchen, Lynn’s solitaire table, and the studio building where they drank a bottle’s worth of champagne toasts to Coward during one night of particularly intense air raids over London. I fell in love in a day, vowing to leave pencil marks on my walls when decorating (because one cannot see such marks on stage sets, from the audience); to hold theatrical retreats at Ten Chimneys to soak up the karma; and most importantly to marry an attractive and ridiculously talented young actor who shared my Lunt-transformation aspirations.

Of course much of the allure for me is the urbane glamour of the stage combined with the rural farm life of Wisconsin. That was the Lunts. Spend the year on Broadway, in London or touring the country — and then relax all summer – cooking gourmet food from one’s own garden – in the Midwest? Yes, please!

My obsessions and future plans aside, this biography has been a great read. Mr Brown does his best to discuss their craft, finesse and superb technical skill; and being a young artist myself I particularly enjoyed the chapters about their early years, their struggles and successes and dreaming big dreams over dinner from the deli downstairs.

But I have been most struck by the account of their time during World War II. Having remained adamantly apolitical prior to 1940, during the war years that position completely reversed. They volunteered tirelessly at the American Theatre Wing’s Stage Door Canteen in New York, providing free food and entertainment to over 3,000 enlisted service members every night; made numerous donations and contributions, including weeks of box office grosses, to any number of war relief funds; gave speeches and radio addresses; ran a Pulitzer-prize-winning, strongly anti-war play on Broadway, across the country and internationally; and finally emigrated, in 1943, to London to perform there and at Allied bases on the continent, for the duration of the war.

I will share this anecdote from when There Shall Be No Night toured to Canada (file it under Why We Do Theater, Reason #783):

The Lunts were invited to visit with the speaker of the Canadian House of Commons, were given a reception by the lieutenant governor and, most rewarding of all, Premier MacKenzie King told them privately that the production of There Shall Be No Night marked a turning point in Canadian-American relations. The play had given him the courage to initiate a serious dialogue with Washington concerning the likelihood of war, he said. In Fontanne’s words, “He wanted to say exactly what he thought about how [the United States and Canada] could cooperate in the crisis. But he was using the guarded terms of diplomacy which means so little or so much according to what one wishes to make of them. When he saw There Shall Be No Night he decided to give up these phrases and come down to the statements that anybody could understand. He told us this himself.”

Times have changed; the theater has changed; stage actors no longer enjoy the same fame or following they once did. But the artist’s impulse remains the same. The Lunts are an inspiration not only for the life they created for themselves, but for their unmatched dedication to their craft, their never-ending pursuit of excellence, and – most importantly – their unflagging service to their art and their fellow man.