*

It was originally about attention: paying attention and being able to focus. And it was thanks to a friend of mine, Bob Leckey, who I was working with. He had (and still has) this really wonderful ability to quietly focus on things, to see how they work. And I asked him, “How are you doing this?” Bob told me he’d been having trouble concentrating. So he went to Barre, Massachusetts, to the Insight Meditation Society headquarters, and did a ten-day silent retreat. He said that after the retreat, all his scattered thoughts had calmed down, and he was able to focus. His mind was, as he put it, like a beam. He could kind of move it here or there, look at things steadily for a long time. And I thought, Whoa, I’d like a mind like a beam! So I went there myself: Insight Meditation Society in Western Massachusetts. This was in ’77, I think maybe their second or third year. It was very early in their programming, and they were pretty hardcore at the time. You’d get up at four, meditate, have your only meal of the day, then a bell would ring and you’d do walking meditation, then sitting, then some water, and then more practice. So it was many, many hours a day. When I got there, they asked, “Why are you here?” And I said, “I’m here to get a mind like a beam.” And they said, “Oh no, no, this is a path of pain.” And I said, “No, I’m talking about a beam!” So we had this very ridiculous conversation, ping-ponging back and forth between pain and beam, pain and beam. And finally, after a couple of days, I realized it really was about pain. They said, “You’re here because you’re in pain.” And I said, “No, no, no, that’s not why I’m here.” But I realized… that was why I was there. And it was a very unique way of looking at pain.

Competition, prizes and awards are part of a patriarchal construct that destroys love and creativity by creating and protecting a singular hierarchical commodification of quality that does not, ever, represent the myriad successful expressions of art and art making. If you must use that construct, you use it the way one uses public transport. Get on, then get off at your stop and find your people. Don’t live on the bus, and most importantly, don’t get trapped on it.

Edelman’s collaborators spoke of his supreme skill as an interviewer, how he builds rapport with his subjects, prodding them to reveal shockingly honest feelings about their lives. His method is simple but profound: preparation and duration. He inhales every document he can, synthesizes all he learns, prepares pages of questions and then, when he is in the room with an interview subject — often for many hours at a time — sets the notes aside. He knows so much about the people he is speaking to that he disarms them, producing obscure episodes from their pasts that intrigue them. He is “offering them a real space to talk about their experience. To really roam around and find the right words,” Rosenberg told me. “You see people thinking on camera,” and their buried memories begin to surface.

I thought about whether seeing these images amounted to a desecration. Does the whole world need to know about the very private, ugly torments of this genius? But then I registered the dominant sensation the film produced, which was awe. Whatever chaos was unfolding in the corners of Paisley Park, in public Prince alchemized it into singing that was majestic and generative and leapt over walls. The film shows, more movingly and convincingly than almost anything I’ve seen, how life can illuminate art, and yet how separate the two things really are. The bruises and mess of experience are transfigured by the artist into something coherent and whole: a perfect offering.

Garner’s prose is a singular mixture of intimacy and distance. Indeed, we often learn about her characters by how quickly they characterize or mischaracterize each other. Sometimes the sense of choral consciousness produced by this swiftly circulating point of view reminds me of a radically pared-down Virginia Woolf. [...] Garner, like the skilled musician, knows how to leave a silence, how to keep domains of privacy and mystery intact. In “The Children’s Bach,” there are no false resolutions. The efficiency and precision of Garner’s descriptions (Philip, for instance, falls “into strange beds in houses where a boiling saucepan might as easily contain a syringe as an egg”) allows her to accomplish in a sentence what for other writers would require pages of exposition, ruining the effect. And the speed at which decisions unfold—watch Athena’s life beautifully unravel (or are we watching it finally begin?) in the first six paragraphs of her trip to Sydney—reminds us how plot is inseparable from a writer’s prosody, the rhythm of events. When the sentences are as finely tuned as Garner’s, music as much as character is fate.