The Element (8 page)

“My life to me is like sort of a disjointed dream,” he said in a PBS interview. “Things have happened to me—incredible. It’s so disjointed. But all I know, it was a constant effort, a constant feeling that I must not fail.”

Parks’s contribution to American culture is considerable: his searing photography, most notably
American Gothic
, which juxtaposed a black woman holding a mop and broom against the American flag; his inspired film work, including the breakout hit
Shaft
, which introduced Hollywood to the black action hero; his unconventional prose work; and his unique musical work.

I don’t know if Gordon Parks ever took a standardized academic test or a college entrance exam. Given his lack of traditional education, there’s a good chance he wouldn’t have scored particularly high on one if he had. Interestingly, while he never completed high school, he amassed forty honorary doctorates—dedicating one of them to the teacher who had been so dismissive when he was in high school. Yet by any reasonable definition of the word, Gordon Parks was remarkably intelligent, a rare human being with an uncanny ability to learn and master complex and nuanced art forms.

I can only guess that Parks considered himself intelligent. However, if he was like so many others I’ve met in my travels, his lack of formal education might have caused him to rate himself much lower than he should have in spite of his numerous and obvious gifts.

As the stories of Gordon Parks, Mick Fleetwood, and Bart Conner indicate, intelligence can show itself in ways that have little or nothing to do with numbers and words. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it, including all the different ways we use our senses (however many of those there turn out to be). We think in sound. We think in movement. We think visually. I worked for a long time with the Royal Ballet in Britain and came to see that dance is a powerful way to express ideas and that dancers use multiple forms of intelligence—kinesthetic, rhythmic, musical, and mathematical—to accomplish this. Were mathematical and verbal intelligence the only kinds that existed, ballet never would have been created. Nor would abstract painting, hip-hop, design, architecture, or self-service checkouts at supermarkets.

The diversity of intelligence is one of the fundamental underpinnings of the Element. If you don’t embrace the fact that you think about the world in a wide variety of ways, you severely limit your chances of finding the person that you were meant to be.

An individual who represents this wonderful diversity is R. Buckminster Fuller, best known for his design of the geodesic dome and his coining of the term
Spaceship Earth
. Certainly his greatest accomplishments come in the field of engineering (which of course requires the use of mathematical, visual, and interpersonal intelligence), but he was also a clever and unusual writer, a philosopher who challenged the beliefs of a generation, an ardent environmentalist years before the emergence of a true environmental movement, and a challenging and nurturing university professor. He did all of this by eschewing formal education (he was the first in four generations in his family not to graduate from Harvard) and setting out to experience the world to use the fullest range of his intelligence. He joined the navy, started a building supply company, and worked as a mechanic in a textile mill and a laborer in a meatpacking plant. Fuller seemingly saw no limits on his ability to use every form of intelligence available to him.

The second feature of intelligence is that it is tremendously dynamic. The human brain is intensely interactive. You use multiple parts of it in every task you perform. It is in fact in the dynamic use of the brain—finding new connections between things—that true breakthroughs occur.

Albert Einstein, for instance, took great advantage of the dynamics of intelligence. Einstein’s prowess as a scientist and mathematician are legend. However, Einstein was a student of all forms of expression, believing that he could put anything that challenged the mind to use in a variety of ways. For instance, he interviewed poets to learn more about the role of intuition and imagination.

In his biography of Einstein, Walter Isaacson says, “As a young student, he never did well with rote learning. And later, as a theorist, his success came not from the brute strength of his mental processing power but from his imagination and creativity. He could construct complex equations, but more important, he knew that math is the language nature uses to describe her wonders.”

When confounded by a challenge in his work, Einstein often turned to the violin to help him. A friend of Einstein’s told Isaacson, “He would often play his violin in his kitchen late at night, improvising melodies while he pondered complicated problems. Then, suddenly, in the middle of playing he would announce excitedly, ‘I’ve got it!’ As if by inspiration, the answer to the problem would have come to him in the midst of the music.”

What Einstein seemed to understand is that intellectual growth and creativity come through embracing the dynamic nature of intelligence. Growth comes through analogy, through seeing how things connect rather than only seeing how they might be different. Certainly, the epiphany stories in this book indicate that many of the moments when things suddenly come clear happen from seeing new connections between events, ideas, and circumstances.

The third feature of intelligence is that it is entirely distinctive. Every person’s intelligence is as unique as a fingerprint. There might be seven, ten, or a hundred different forms of intelligence, but each of us uses these forms in different ways. My profile of abilities involves a different combination of dominant and dormant intelligences than yours does. The person down the street has another profile entirely. Twins use their intelligences differently from one another, as do people on opposite sides of the globe.

This brings us back to the question I asked earlier: How are you intelligent? Knowing that intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinctive allows you to address that question in new ways. This is one of the core components of the Element. For when you explode your preconceived ideas about intelligence, you can begin to see your own intelligence in new ways. No person is a single intellectual score on a linear scale. And no two people with the same scores will do the same things, share all of the same passions, or accomplish the same amount with their lives. Discovering the Element is all about allowing yourself access to all of the ways in which you experience the world, and discovering where your own true strengths lie.

Just don’t take them for granted.

CHAPTER THREE

Beyond Imagining

FAITH RINGGOLD is an acclaimed artist, best known for her painted story quilts. She has exhibited in major museums all over the world, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. In addition, she is an award-winning writer, having received the Caldecott Honor for her first book,
Tar Beach
. She has also composed and recorded songs.

Faith’s life brims with creativity. Interestingly, though, she found herself on this path when illness kept her out of school. She got asthma when she was two, and because of this, had a late start to formal education. During our interview, she told me that she felt that being out of school with asthma made a positive difference in her development “because I was not around for some of the indoctrinations, you know? I was not around to be really formed in the way that I think a lot of kids are formed in a regimented society, which a school is and I guess it has to be in a sense. Because when you have a lot of people in one space, you have to move them around in a certain way to make it work. I just did not ever get hooked into the regimentation. I missed all of kindergarten and the first grade. By the second grade, I was going. But every year, I would be absent for at least, I don’t know, maybe two or three weeks with asthma. And I absolutely did not mind missing those classes.”

Her mother worked hard with her to help her keep pace with what she was missing in school. And when they weren’t studying, they were able to explore the wider world of the arts that existed all around Harlem in the 1930s.

“My mother took me to see all the great acts of that time. Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Billy Eckstine—all these old singers and bandleaders and all those people who were so wonderful. And so these people were the ones who I thought of as being highly creative. It was so obvious that they were making this art out of their own bodies. We all lived in the same neighborhood. You just ran into them—here they are, you know? I was deeply inspired by their art and by their willingness to give of themselves to the public and to their audience. It made me understand about the communication aspect of being an artist.

“I was never forced to be like the other kids. I did not dress like them. I did not look like them. And in my family, it was not expected that I should be like that. So, it came quite natural to me to do something that was considered a bit odd. My mother was a fashion designer. She was an artist herself, although she would never have said she was an artist. She helped me a lot, but she was very keen on the fact that she did not know whether art would be a good lifetime endeavor.”

When Faith at last began going to school full-time, she found encouragement and excitement in her art classes.

“We had art in elementary school right straight through. An excellent experience. Excellent. I distinctly recall my teachers getting excited about some of the things that I had done and me kind of wondering, Why do they think this is so good?—but I never said anything. In junior high school, the teacher did a project with us in which she wanted us to try to see it without looking. We were supposed to paint these flowers in that way. I said, ‘Oh my god, I do not want her to see this, because this is really awful.’ And she held it up and said, ‘Now, this is really wonderful. Look at this.’

“Now I know why she liked it. It was free and it was the same kind of thing that I like when I see children do art. It is expressive; it is wonderful. This is the kind of magic that children have. Children do not see anything so strange and different about art. They accept it; they understand it; they love it. They walk into a museum and they are looking all around, they do not feel threatened. Whereas adults do. They think there are some messages there they do not get, that they are supposed to have something to say or do in relation to these works of art. The children can just accept it because somehow or other they are born that way. And they stay that way until they begin to start picking themselves apart. Now, maybe it is because we start picking them apart. I try not to do that, but the world is going to pick them apart and, you know, judge them this way and that—this does not look like a tree, or this does not look like a man. When children are little, they are not paying attention to that. They are just—they are just unfolding right before your eyes. ‘This is my mommy and this is my daddy and we went to the house and cut down the tree and this and that and the other,’ and they tell you a whole story about it, and they accept it and they think it is wonderful. And I do too. Because they are completely unrepressed where these things are concerned.

“I think children have that same natural ability in music. Their little voices are like little bells that they are ringing. I went to a school where I did a forty-minute session with each of the grades, starting with the prekindergarten, going all the way up to the sixth grade. I did this art session with them in which they would read from a book and then I would teach them. I would show them some of my slides and then I would teach them how to sing my song ‘Anyone Can Fly.’ They just picked that up, whether they were little prekindergarten, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade. By the fifth grade, you are running into trouble. Their little voices are no longer like bells; they are feeling ashamed of themselves, you know, and some of them who can still sing will not.”

Fortunately, Faith never felt stifled in this way. She loved exploring her creativity from an early age, and she managed to keep that spark alive into adulthood.

“I think the minute that I started studying art in college in 1948 I knew I wanted to be an artist. I did not know which road I would take, how it would happen, or how I could be that, but I knew that was my goal. My dream was to be an artist, one who makes pictures for a lifetime, as a way of life. Every day of your life you can create something wonderful, so every day is going to be the same kind of wonderful day that every other day is—a day in which you discover something new because as you are painting or creating whatever it is you are creating, you are finding new ways in doing it.”

I mentioned that I like to ask audiences how intelligent they feel they are. I usually ask these same people how they rate their creativity. As with intelligence, I use a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 at the top. And, as with intelligence, most people rate themselves somewhere in the middle. Out of perhaps a thousand people, fewer than twenty give themselves 10 for creativity. A few more will put their hands up for 9 and 8. On the other end, a handful always puts themselves at 2 or 1. I think that people are mostly wrong in these assessments, just as they are about their intelligence.