I overthink a lot of things.
After more than 4 decades of tightening and loosening nuts and bolts, I can still confuse myself about which way to pull the handle of the ratchet when it’s facing away from me. The mnemonic “lefty-loosy, righty-tighty” works great when you are looking directly at the fastener you’re about to rotate. But when you have to reach around to put a wrench on the back of something, or up inside some compartment, it becomes less helpful. And the more awkwardly I need to contort my arm to get access to the fastener, the more likely I am to befuddle myself with too much thinking about which way to turn to get it off (or on – though the issue is nearly always to do with removal). Maybe this is a consequence of being an occasional mechanic. Perhaps I would function more fluidly if I were mechanicing every day. Or maybe I am just paranoid because, more than once, I have ended up cranking against a nut that moved the slightest bit at first and then refused to loosen any further… only to realize I had actually been tighten it.
Sometimes the consequence of tightening when I meant to loosen is just feeling a little foolish – perhaps even glancing around to check whether anyone sees what I’ve done, or what I am doing, as I reorient the tools and back the nut off again. More often though, the consequence is that it creates a new problem that has to be solved before you can just get on with whatever you were trying to do in the first place. Sometimes the fastener becomes so tight that you can’t get it back off with the same wrench you just used to get it on. Then you need to spend a bunch of time and energy finding enough leverage (or heat) to simply undo the tightening and get things back to the point where you started. Other times, the problem escalates, because you start causing damage. Steel has a finite strength and it is mailable. If you torque on a nut or bolt hard enough, you eventually round over the corners that the wrench is supposed to grip. Then you are in real trouble, because once you lose purchase on the fastener, things degenerate quickly until you can’t twist it at all. The best case scenario when this happens is that you destroy the nut or bolt getting it off (by clamping vice grips on it or just cutting/drilling the damned thing off) and then you have the extra chore of finding a replacement when you go to put it back together. Often though, steel corners round over quite suddenly and the wrench slips off before you can react. And when you are cranking hard on a wrench and it suddenly breaks loose, your knuckles are almost always headed directly toward some other sharp (probably rusty) piece of steel. That’s just basic physics.
I have been embarrassed, frustrated, and bloodied by these sorts of “which way to turn the wrench” situations often enough that they give me pause. I don’t want to admit how many bloodied knuckles it took to developed enough wisdom to realize that, in these situations, too much involvement of the stuff between my ears is bad. But eventually I did come to realize, if I find myself starting to overthink which way I should be turning a wrench, I simply need to stop thinking and just reach my hand up to physically touch the nut or bolt I’m puzzling over. I let my fingers start moving as they would to loosen the nut or bolt. Then I just stick the wrench on there and move it in the same direction my fingers were going. Ultimately, that expertise doesn’t reside in my head. Its in my fingers.
Fingers are quiet though. And brains are loud and clumsy. You can’t hear what fingers have to say until you shut the brain up.
The same applies for playing a guitar. Mistakes always follow when I am actively thinking about what my hands are doing (or, perhaps more accurately, what they are about to do). There are times I find myself in the middle of some song that I’ve played a hundred times, suddenly unable to remember what chord comes next. It only happens when I am consciously thinking about what my hands are doing though, and when it does, it’s like coasting into a snowdrift you didn’t see: momentum is gone before you can react. But the way through the song and snowdrift are usually the same: back up a bit and try again with more momentum. Musically, this is achieved by starting again, at the beginning of a verse or chorus (or some other convenient break) and playing with feeling. A focus on emotion can hold conscious thought at bay and provides the momentum for fingers to find their way to the right spot on the fretboard. The expertise doesn’t reside in my head. It is in my fingers.
In a presentation to students at the Berkley School of Music, Tommy Emmanuel held up his hands to show them what discipline looks like. He pointed out differences between his right and left hand that resulted from decades of playing guitar. The first time I saw the video of his talk, I sat marveling over how much time and effort must have gone into his playing for it to manifest physiologically in his hands. I held up my own hands to try to imagine what that must be like. And suddenly I didn’t need to imagine anymore. I saw it. It is in my flesh too.
The fingers on my left hand, the fretting hand, spread significantly wider than my right hand. In fact, the thumb and pinkie on that hand stretch so that they can point almost 180-degrees apart from each other. On my right hand, that angle is more like 135-degrees. When I just hold the hands up and spread out my fingers, the difference is most pronounced in the angles between my pinkies and their adjacent ring fingers. But if I just go through each pair of adjacent fingers all four angles angles are wider on the hand that has to stretch and contort to reach from one note to the next on the fretboard. The thumbs are different too. If I put my palms down flat on the same surface and stretch them out, my right thumb is rotated about 30-degrees from my left thumb. My right thumb is closer to the same plane as the back of my hand – which better positions it, when I curl it around, to press the pick flat against the side of the index finger on that hand (very similar to the gesture used to hold a pencil against the side of the middle finger, so 4 decades of scribbling and drawing may have something to do with the way that thumb is rotated too). The left thumb is rotated to more directly oppose my fingertips when I curl it around to pinch against them – which is essentially what it is doing on the back of the guitar neck.
They are not big differences. You probably wouldn’t notice them if I didn’t point them out. (Or maybe you would. I don’t know, maybe it is what people whisper about when I am not around – but no one has ever commented to me about my oddly asymmetrical hands.) I didn’t notice the differences myself until I went looking for them.
I was not surprised to find those differences though. They explain some of the changes in my experience of playing over the years.
I distinctly remember, when I first started playing guitar, struggling to get the fingers on my left hand to reach from one note to the next. I think I was trying to learn a solo that had been tabbed in some guitar magazine or songbook. There was a combination of three notes that all needed to be played on the same string to get the phrasing right. My index finger needed to remain in place on the lowest fret while my ring finger and pinkie were supposed to alternate on a few frets higher. I think it was a total span of 5 or 6 frets from index finger to pinkie and my hand had trouble doing it. It just wouldn’t stretch that far. At the time I just thought my hands were too small. But they haven’t gotten any bigger – and yet I make that span, and larger ones, effortlessly now. I also remember dropping my pick all the time early on. I think every guitarist is familiar with the upside-down-guitar, pick-retrieval shake. Brad Paisley and Keith Urban have a great gag about it that makes me laugh every time I hear it. Like a lot of infuriating things – the memory of the frustration makes it funnier in retrospect. It hasn’t happened to me in decades though. My thumb grips that pick like a nut I accidentally wrenched the wrong way. Those changes were enabled by changes in the physiological structure of my hands. But they didn’t just happen. It was a slow and methodical process.
I estimate that, over the past 30 years, I have played a guitar an average of 30 minutes per day. To be clear, that is an average over all the days – which is to say it doesn’t actually represent any typical day of practice. I can’t imagine playing for just 30 minutes. That is just a warm up period. If I pick up a guitar, I usually can’t put it down for an hour or more. There have been periods over the past few decades in which I have gone weeks at a time playing 2-3 hours each day. I have also gone weeks at a time without playing at all. So the 30-min per day average has a WIDE standard deviation. But 30 years of that has resulted in guitar-playing becoming, literally, embodied for me. So, when I say the expertise is in my fingers, when it comes to guitar, it is literally in my physiology. You can see it when I hold up my hands. And subjecting them to the discipline of guitar is how the expertise got in there.
If the discipline of mechanicing has manifest itself in my physiology, I have not figured out how to see it yet. My hands do bear the scars of bloodied knuckles and other steel-and-physics related injuries. But those are just reminders of mistakes. They are reminders of having been disciplined (in the sense of punishment). They are not functional changes that have been brought about by subjecting myself to the discipline of the work. Perhaps it is just that I haven’t spent nearly as much time with a wrench in my hands as I have with a guitar. But I think the lack of physiological markers is more to do with the differences in the nature of the work. The work of a mechanic is more conceptual and intellectual. And it is much less routine. Every nut and every bolt is different – there are slight differences arising from the ways they are machined and the composition of the steel from which they were produced. More significantly though, any mechanism that has been out in the world has a unique history of corrosion, vibration, manipulation etc. It is always different. The work of a mechanic is more forensic. The work of a musician is more enactive and it usually has more consistent structure around it. The proportions of the fretboard are always the same. 4/4 time can be faster or slower, but the meter itself is always the same. The ratios of frequencies among notes in a major chord is always the same. That structure is what enables improvisation. Both guitaring and mechanicing involve think-y stuff and do-y stuff – just in different proportions. Both rely on planning, structure, and improvisation. But when it comes to actually doing the thing, you have to do the thinking part – to make a plan – then get the oafish brain out of the way and trust the fingers to execute the plan.
This kind of expertise seems ineffable. People who don’t have the embodied knowledge often want to call it muscle memory. That phrase has always bothered me – in the same way “emotional intelligence” bothers me. As Parker Palmer says, it’s because of patriarchal hyper-rationality that we make-up constructs like emotional intelligence in order to avoid having to talk about feelings. Bluntly, “emotional intelligence” is an intellectualized simulacrum for people who resist experience with emotion – or perhaps they lack affective expertise (i.e., empathy). Similarly, I would argue that intellectuals make up constructs like “muscle memory” because their identities are invested in a belief that everything important happens between their ears. They can’t fathom knowing being embodied elsewhere.
But my experience is that it feels awfully dismissive to have that sort of expertise explained away as mere muscle “memory.”
Like all mechanics and musicians, my hands and fingers are sensitive feedback mechanisms. I can tell a lot about the material properties of a nut or bolt head just by touching it, by the way the wrench feels on it, by the texture of parts around it. Other senses come into play too, especially what I can see of the condition of things. And of course I am always busy integrating all of that stuff into a mental model in my head as I am fixing things. That is what the stuff between ears excels at – organizing information. But my hands are not just slavishly following ingrained pathways they have been trained to reproduce. They are not mindlessly retracing memories. Each situation is different. There is no set routine to follow. They just know what they are doing. Usually, I can’t even articulate what it is they are sensing. Most of it is not available to my conscious awareness. In fact, trying to raise it to conscious awareness, as with trying to reason through which way to turn a nut or thinking about what my hands are doing on a guitar, screws it all up. Experienced hands just know where to go and how hard they can push – before they even get started. And they know how to move in tight spaces to get the leverage they need. They are constantly adjusting to feedback I am not consciously aware of. They know when something is about to go wrong. And they stop before it happens.
I actually can’t remember the last time I was surprise by bloodied knuckles. That is not to say it doesn’t still happen. But these days, blood on my knuckles is a result of a conscious choice. I don’t mean that I am masochistic. My hands almost always stop before they injure themselves and usually I respond by adjusting what I am doing to prevent injury. Sometimes there is no way around it though. There just isn’t another way to get a stubborn fastener off – or I am too impatient to find a different way – and my brain consciously overrides my hands to send them to a collision with unrelenting steel anyway as a sort of blood sacrifice to Metalicor (the god of machining).
I don’t mean this all to come off as self-congratulatory naval-gazing (or phalanges-gazing as it were). There is nothing unique about the expertise in my hands. Literally millions of people have developed the same expertise. And we all have embodied expertise of some sort. It is just that, as I puzzle through this notion of embodied expertise, it easier for me to ponder the work of my hands, because the bullshit quotient is lower than it is for other domains in which I think I can claim expertise. Also, I’ve been writing to find out what I think – and one of the things writing this piece helped me realize is that the real problem with dismissing the knowing done in hands as mere “muscle memory” is that it diminishes its value. And we have a whole hierarchy of socioeconomic status based on the assumption that the important stuff happens between our ears. Expertise in the hands is, generally, less well compensated than expertise in the head.
Roll over Plato.
Knowing doesn’t just happen in our heads. It is a full body activity.
It is also team sport… but that is a different post.