On being the rest of us

For everyone who is not Pauline Oliveros

Portrait of the young Pauline Oliveros as an absolute don

I spent part of this past week thinking about the work of experimental composer Pauline Oliveros.

If you don't know about her, don't worry. Unless you have a niche interest in early electronic or experimental music, you probably wouldn't have heard of her.

In that world, though, her importance is almost unmatched. She was born in Texas in 1932, at a time when there were few women composers much less out gay experimental women composers. And she just stormed the fucking castles. One of her first productions inspired the famous San Francisco Tape Music Center. Her early electronic music overflows an eight-box set. She published a book of DIY experimental compositions before John Cage got the idea. She bounced her music off the surface of the fucking moon. From the 1950s on until she died in 2016 she was exploring the cutting edge, teaching and collaborating and making music.

As someone who has literally made it my business to help people get full access to their talents, I look at Oliveros and see the absolute gold standard of what ‘full access’ looks like.

Trace her career across the decades and you’ll find an entire life lived from a place that is notoriously hard to locate: the point where play and exploration intersect with rigour and expertise. Where you know how to step into an experiment with lightness and low expectation but carry it through with precise and uncompromising intelligence.

And then you create results that explode conventions and create new fields.

For six decades.

That is what it looks like to be an open fucking channel.

And the more I thought about this fact as the week unfolded, the more I started to wonder:

Why didn't I find all this more depressing?

I mean, there are so few of us who will have that unerring, shot-from-the-arrow-of-the-gods quality to the way we live out our talents. You can look at the picture of Oliveros I used for this article and see it in her already, in her refusal to smile and that heartbreaker stance. She's a fucking don, from the go.

My trajectory certainly looks nothing like this. I quit my creative writing major the first time I thought I might not be an order of magnitude better than everyone else in the room. In my early 20s I was an editorial assistant (read: secretary) in a tiny publishing house and terrified that was the end of the road for me. When I started applying to grad schools I was so freaked out and conflicted that I had a weapons-grade sinus infection that lasted a full year. I was invisible in my PhD programme. It took me eight years to write my second book.

At every part of that grim story, I also had moments that kept me going, when I proved to myself and the world some measure of what I could do. But that only happened because I was fighting the grim version of my story tooth-and-nail the entire time. Until I found the tools that helped me change my brain for good, a lot of my life was spent just struggling to keep that channel open even a crack.

So from a certain perspective, I should look at Oliveros and feel sad. I'll never have that glorious, unimpeded through-line. As liberated from avoidance as I feel now, my past will always be fissured with fits and starts. Most of my backstory is clearly the that of someone trying and only sometimes succeeding at getting out of her own stupid way.

I don't live that life anymore, but it took me decades to get there. Decades when if I'd been like Oliveros I'd have been pouring my talents into the world.

But I don't find Oliveros's story depressing. I find it galvanising. It feels like being zapped with a little of the energy that makes us want to open the channel in the first place. It made me excited to talk about her with other people who try to do work at the edge of their capacities. It made me want to write this post on a day I definitely did not have time to do it.

The fact is, I think Oliveros’s story is important for the rest of us precisely because we aren’t living it, for two reasons.

First, Oliveros's trajectory is so remarkable that it illuminates a key fact we tend to forget. Which is: the unimpeded channel is the vanishingly rare exception, not the rule.

A major percentage of people with significant talent find accessing and opening that channel a struggle whose daily outcome does not feel guaranteed. I promise you that some of the things that most inspire you in your field were created by people who had fissures and fits and starts and almost gave up a million times. Who had dark nights of the soul and wondered why they were still even trying.

It’s undeniably great to be like Oliveros. But most of aren't, and we still do great things. We may not be an arrow shot by the gods, but we still hit the target. For most of us, it starts happening consistently when we stop feeling like our emotional survival rests on getting a bullseye every time. Which means we are finally able to re-find some of the curiosity and sense of discovery that usually got us interested in the path in the first place.

That playfulness is connected to the other reason I find Oliveros’s story so powerful and moving. Because she has that gloriously unblocked access to her genius, you can’t engage with her work for any time without seeing what it really looks like to be a fully open channel—and it’s so much more wacky and individual than we usually imagine. And that wackiness was not incidental. Oliveros had seriousness of purpose but not seriousness of self-presentation. A lot of her work focused on the idea that what she did was not exceptional—that the kinds of listening she tried to describe and promote were available to all of us, all the time.

When I look at her career, I see a reminder that it’s not too late for any of us who are still trying to access our talents. In her zest and zaniness and curiosity, she makes measuring yourself against someone else’s output or counting up your achievements look absurd. As in: the point of accessing that channel isn’t to ensure we make the highest possible number of important things in the least amount of time. The point is to just have an opportunity to be the fucking channel, to get to experience what it’s like to plug into a source that feels electrifyingly infinite. And the only time-based requirement for that experience is that we’re still alive.

When I pay attention to Oliveros, there is no mistaking the real endgame here. The unimpeded outpouring of her talent doesn’t land like a rebuke. It lands like an invitation. It says: Come in. You already know how to do this. The water is just fine.

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For more information on Oliveros: [with updated now functional links!]

• A much better overview than Wikipedia

• A trailer from a documentary film about her

• A good album to start with