For the Love of Paper

The physicality of the material world is both sensorial and psychological. Wait, I can explain! I mean that you have sensations and emotions when you handle an object. Wait, I’ll explain again! I have my new book in my hands, and I’m good and happy.

I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. Personal computers were the stuff of science fiction. Watching “The Jetsons,” my siblings and I had innocent pleasures daydreaming in front of the TV and half-imagining those impossible flying pods and robot maids. But our childhood and adolescence were completely analogical.

We played LPs on a Victrola. (This phrase alone is so analog that I cough up dust just typing it.) Dial-up landline phones! And our next-door neighbors didn’t even have a phone, because in Brazil back then phones weren’t widely available. One of the neighbor girls was called Lili. She’d receive phone calls on our line, and we’d have to shout “LILLLLLIIIIIIIIII!” to get her to rush over and answer the call.

Analog has a zillion dimensions, but let’s focus on one: paper. Newspapers made of paper; magazines made of paper; toilet paper made of paper (unlike digital toilet paper, of course). And books. Believe it or not, every single book in our lives was made of paper. Novels, short stories, histories: paper, paper, paper. The dictionary, also called “o pai dos burros” (“the father of the dummies”), was a big brick of thin paper. And the thin analog paper held an analog infinitude of analog words and definitions.

We collected stamps. We handled envelopes. We licked the glue behind a regular stamp, and we stuck the stamp to an envelope and sent a letter, via air mail, to a country unreachable by cable or satellite. If you wanted to visit the country in person, you had to take a paper boat.

I learned Esperanto (face-to-face, at a night school!) when I was about 12 or 13, and I corresponded analogically with other Esperanto-loving young nerds in Bolivia and Czechoslovakia (a country that doesn’t exist anymore).

As an adult, I started writing my first book by hand, using legal pads, index cards, office paper, pen and pencil. I composed it by hand for three years, when I finally bought my first computer: an Apple PowerBook 160 with 40 MB of storage, totally Jetsons! For a couple of decades I wrote sometimes by hand, sometimes directly at the computer. But these days I rarely write by hand anymore. This blog post, for instance, passed directly from my mind to my MacBook Pro 14 with 1 TB of storage, which is more than twenty-five thousand times what my first computer held. May George Jetson rest in peace.

I’ve been writing professionally since 1990, and the experience of receiving a new book fresh out of the printers isn’t new to me. And yet, the not-new experience is never-old experience either. There’s nothing like it in the whole world! Paper, many pages of it; text and photos, a cover, binding, the analog aroma. A new computer has its own interesting and pleasant smell, but a book is a different matter. L’Oréal should release a perfume called “Biblos,” reminiscent of tree bark and reeds and—and dry cellulose. I get my highs from sniffing cellulose.

Hands, Wrists, Fingers. What a good title for a book that you touch and leaf through with your own hands, wrists, and fingers. Maybe the book should have been titled Hands, Wrists, Fingers, Nostrils: An Author is Flying Oh-So-High. Wanna get high, too? Order the analog book, then call your neighbor over to read it alongside you. LILLLLLIIIIIIIIII! Failing that, order the e-book and let the low-wattage current of your Kindle give you a faint digital buzz. (Lili doesn’t live here anymore.)

Anthem Press Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk Amazon.fr Amazon.de Barnes & Noble

©2025, Pedro de Alcantara

What is in it?

Imagine a book club where the members highlight passages from a shared book. “This paragraph merits highlighting, it’s so clever! This other paragraph, nah. Boring. Meaningless.” No two readers will highlight the exact same words, sentences, and paragraphs.

A book is a shapeshifting entity. Its contents vary according to who’s reading it.

Have you ever recommended a beloved book to a friend, just for the friend to be surprised, shocked, and disappointed that you, Pedro, of all people, could have loved such a lousy little book? There’s a difference between saying “This is a great book” and “This book speaks to me (and I speak to it).”

Books are like artworks, compositions, situations, ideas, people, and dogs. They exist in the perceptions of the readers, the museum goers, the listeners, the cats. It’s a well-known fact (besides being a fact, pure and simple) that readers rewrite books in their minds, according to their own temperament, their preferences, their life experiences, their blind spots.

I invite you to rewrite my new book: Hands, Wrists, Fingers.

Come mid-October, HWF will be out there in the world, taking walks, meeting people, and approaching cats—some of which will purr, while others will growl and hiss (according to their temperament, their life experiences, etc.).

Hands, wrists, and fingers, not by themselves but in connection with creativity, health, culture, and metaphysics. Hands and language, hands and touch, hands and craft, hands and music. Hands as mirrors of who we are and how we think about ourselves and about the world. Hands as entry points to the exploration of identity, destiny, and the mystery of existence. Children’s hands, dancerly hands, the hands of musicians as they practice and perform. Hands as the stories that we tell about our own hands.

The book is divided in four sections and sixteen chapters. It contains a wealth of concepts and anecdotes, and it proposes many exercises suited to all readers even though the book’s title says “creative health for musicians.” It’s illustrated by nearly 200 photos. You can skip the anecdotes and enjoy the photos, you can skip the photos and enjoy the exercises, you can skip the exercises and enjoy your meandering journey as you rewrite the book according to your needs and wants.

I created 36 video clips, not explaining any exercises but reacting to the book’s ideas. Let’s say that I perform a one-man show in 36 episodes, mostly without talking (the book, I think, talks a lot already). The soundtracks of the episodes consist of my own compositions and improvisations (for the cello, the voice, the piano, the Native American flute, the guitar, the cymbals, and the French horn, so help me God). The clips are hosted by the publisher, Anthem Press.

Purr, growl, hiss. I hope you’ll purr, but who am I to tell you how to rewrite my book in your mind and heart! Meow!

Yessssssss!

The word “flow” comes from an old, old root that also gave birth to flight, flit, fleet, fluster. And flood. Also, pneumonic and pulmonary, partly because “fl-” and “pl-” are closely related. “Il pleut,” French for “it’s raining,” is a manifestation of the same root.

The flow of blood through your veins: a big deal, right? The flight of imagination. A flood of ideas. And if you’re fleet-footed, off you go.

Think about it: flow makes your day, your weeks and months, your life. If the flow is somehow blocked, most everything gets affected: your day’s work, your movements and your voice, your creativity, your conversations, the dialogue with life. If the flow isn’t channeled, most everything gets affected in a different way: dispersion, distraction, and discombobulation. “Dis-” probably comes from an old, old root! Hey, I just looked it up: the root means “apart, asunder,” and it’s related to “twice,” the notion of “two ways.”

Let’s make a numbered list.

  1. Become keenly aware of flow as a thing in itself: in rivers and oceans; in city traffic; in dance, in gestures, in rhythms; in the sun going up and down, in the clouds going left and right.

  2. Become keenly aware of your own flow: in your habits, in your adaptation to circumstances, in your perceptions. All around you there may be beautiful things, interesting people, important happenings that you don’t see, because your perception isn’t flowing.

  3. Become keenly aware of the changes in your flow: the way food and drink help or hinder your energies, the way your daily routines make you rise and set like the sun or not rise and set like the sun. Talk to your habits and tell them to leave you alone already!

  4. Become keenly aware of the paradox: you make conscious decisions, decisions are made behind the back of your consciousness; you control, oh no you don’t; you should control it more, oh no, you should control rather less. Yes. (“Yes” rhymes with “less.” Lengthen the sibilants, just because it feels good: “Yessssssss, much much lessssssss! What a messssssss!”)

The summer months in the Northern hemisphere are coming to a close. It’s the flow of the calendar, the planetary samba. The days are getting shorter, by a minute every day; the nights are getting longer, by roughly the same amount. Are we the same human beings in summer and in winter? I doubt it. It’s a whole other flow.

In Paris, where I live, August is a special month, the quietest of the whole year. Many, many Parisians leave for their sacrosanct vacations. The city is less busy, less crowded, less polluted, much much lessssssss, yes! Flow and its twin sister dispersion go for walks, visit parks and museums, take photos, make drawings, practice the cello and the piano, receive inklings and insights, take siestas, clean closets, finish projects.

But! But it doesn’t happen automatically. Just an example: I’ve been reworking a project of mine, the one called “La invención de la escritura | The Invention of Writing,” a bilingual cycle of poems illustrated by my drawings.

I’m applying for some funds, there’s a deadline, I have to structure my proposal, I’m drunk with editing, I know and I don’t know what I’m doing and what I need to be doing. The other day my brain said, “Pedro, oh Pedro! I can’t take it any longer!” It took me a while to hear my brain. Then I heard it, and I said, “Brain, oh brain! Let’s put this thing aside and let’s go visit the MAC VAL Museum, shall we?” “Yes oh yessssssss, thank you so much!” We went, my brain and multiple other parts of myself; we flowed with the metro and the tram, we flowed with the museum’s building and garden, we flowed with the exhibitions, we flowed back home. And we re-engaged flowingly with the project and its deadline.

Let’s make another numbered list.

  1. Commit, relax; commit, relax.

  2. Focus, vary; focus, vary.

  3. Control, allow; control, allow.

  4. Surge, recede; surge, recede.

It’s an art. Does it take practice? You’re now friends with “Yes.” Say its name again and again, and lengthen those sssibilants, again and again!

©2025, Pedro de Alcantara

I've Been Framed

Behind a simple act there lies a wealth of possibilities. Let’s take handshakes as an example. You have shaken a thousand hands, ten thousand times. It’s a “nothing” gesture. And yet, it symbolizes connection, acknowledgement, status negotiations, agreements and compromises, thoughts and emotions. The list could go on. Yes, the list is going to go on! Palm to palm and skin to skin, physical contact, the exchange of biological and psychic energies. Shake hands with a stranger, and you’ll immediately gather a lot of information about the stranger. The information might be misleading, and you might misinterpret it, but the information is right there, under your fingertips.

There’s the handshake, and there’s the symbolic power of the handshake. One seems banal, the other is tremendously powerful. The principle of symbolic power is ever-present in our lives. As the dogmatic types among us like saying, THE PRINCIPLE APPLIES TO EVERYTHING. Every little thing has its connections to a symbolic dimension; every little thing is a big deal waiting to come out of its cocoon.

Recently I engaged in a seemingly banal activity: buying frames for some of my drawings and putting the framed drawings up on a wall. Sure, sure, a frame; Pedro, a million people buy frames every day and put a framed photo of some kid up somewhere. Mantelpiece, kitchen counter, whatever, Pedro.

The word “frame” means a lot of different things: a picture frame, a frame of mind, an innocent person framed for a crime. A frame encloses an object, a person, an idea; that is, it closes it off from its surrounding environment and lends it an external structure, which somehow contains and constrains it. A frame separates and emphasizes something. Imagine nine drawings scotch-taped to a wall, and one framed drawing added to the group. The frame says, “I’m holding this; look at this; this one here is distinctive, it’s not like all the others.” You might frame a diploma and hang it somewhere; then the frame signals an honor or a distinction that makes you different from other people who don’t have the diploma or the training and expertise that culminate in the diploma.

Suppose that you’ve made five hundred drawings, all of them currently inside a box inside a closet, invisible to the world. Suppose that, from the five hundred, you choose one drawing to come out of the box and to become visible to the world. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the one in a hundred, the one in five hundred?

To draw is to respond to a lively creative impulse that entails movement, trial and error, transformation: the impulse becomes gesture, and the gesture becomes a sketch or image. “To draw” is an action, a verb, a process; “a drawing” is a noun, a thing, a result. Framing the object furthers objectifies what used to be a lively movement. Hey, let’s let the dogmatic artist shout his emotion: “TO FRAME A DRAWING IS TO KILL A CREATIVE IMPULSE.” Sure, sure, Pedro, you’re a murderer. We’ll visit you in jail, maybe.

My wife Alexis is a devoted builder. If we buy something from Ikea, Alexis will put it up for us while I kill some eggs in the kitchen and frame them in an omelet. Division of labor, you know? Recently I traveled to the US for two weeks, and during my absence Alexis repainted our living room with care and skill. Among other things, she painted one of our walls a color that some people would call maroon, others burgundy or garnet. We had chosen the color together; together we then chose which drawings of mine we’d put up, and in what arrangement. Together we made decisions and indecisions. (Yes, you can make indecisions, particularly when you’re framing sweet drawings for crimes they didn’t commit.) How long did it take for those drawings to go up? The procedure required an unbroken sequence of events starting with the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago. I used to be an amoeba. Growing up was rather time-consuming.

Three years ago, I started exploring brush-and-ink drawings. Some of you are familiar with the story, so I won’t tell it again. Instead, I’ll say this: the word “amoeba” comes from a very ancient root meaning “to change, to go, to move.” (Slowly.)

Wait, don’t buzz off! I want to whisper four practical takeaways into your right brain.

  1. Many things in life are both action-and-object, verb-and-noun.

  2. Be attentive to the inescapable symbolic dimension. It’s a big deal.

  3. Time is bizarre. Seconds can be long, and centuries can be short.

  4. Two amoebas met in a bar. They’re still there. If you order a beer on tap, ask the bartender to wash the glass carefully.

 ©2025, Pedro de Alcantara

The Twelve

Count out loud from one to twelve. It’s a nothing exercise, right?

 One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve.

You’re about to find out that it’s an everything exercise: a portal from dismissal to embrace, from hurry to timelessness, from the profane to the sacred.

Consider the number 12 and how present it is in your life: the twelve months, the twelve signs of the zodiac; the twelve hours, and the other twelve hours, making up a full day; the twelve apostles, the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve Olympian gods of the Parthenon; the twelve members of the jury, which famously became Twelve Angry Men, the fabulous film directed by a young Sydney Lumet. And let’s not forget the dozen eggs.

(And the twelve tones of the chromatic scale, and the twelve fundamentals of the circle of fifths.)

We won’t elaborate the point any further, but we’ll agree (won’t we!) that the number 12 is incredibly powerful from a symbolic and metaphysical point of view. It’s central to our existence.

Let’s spend a little time with mathematics. We can divide 12 by 12, 6, 4, 3, 2, or 1, giving us a wide variety of symmetrical subdivided combinations. The number 10, in comparison, can only be divided by 10, 5, 2, or 1. It’s less flexible, so to speak. Here's an illustration of how twelve can be four times three or three times four.

The rhythms of a language contribute to its prosody. The prosody of English, for instance, is very different from the prosody of Hungarian: stresses, inflections, and groupings of syllables and words make it possible for us to tell, immediately, if someone is speaking English or Hungarian. Here’s a very short poem spicing up the prosody of your counting.

ONE | two | three.

One | TWO | three.

One | two | THREE.

Numbers have names. The number 3, for instance, is called “three.” Counting is a version of naming. Names come with stories and histories. Think of a few everyday names, like Sarah, Pedro, Miguel, and Elizabeth. Look them up on the Internet, and you’ll see that these names have existed for thousands of years and have passed through the Bible, through royal lineages, through wonders and miracles, through joys and terrors. The names of the numbers also come with incredible stories and histories. More than six thousand years ago, a language was spoken in the region that today we call Ukraine. The people who spoke that language traveled widely and disseminated their culture. And you know what happened? Their language had babies. Greek, French, Farsi, Sanskrit, and dozens of other languages are wonderfully complex derivations of a single language, which linguists call Proto-Indo-European.

Whenever you say the name of a number out loud—“three,” “seven,” “one hundred and forty-four”—you’re manifesting a millenary linguistic tradition that binds together many cultures and many people. To count is to be part of something unimaginably gigantic, timeless and ever-present.

Counting requires vowels, diphthongs, and consonants, a wealth of sounds in marvelous combinations. Some of the richness might escape your attention at first. For instance, “one” stars with an unwritten consonant sound, kind of like this: “wone.” Did you know—did you know!—that you’re forever pronouncing unwritten consonant sounds?

Count out loud super-slowly, lengthening every lengthenable sound and enjoying every microsecond of your over-commitment.

Wwwwooooonnnnnne, twoooooooooo, thhhhhhrrrrreeeee . . . .

To count out loud is to engage the lips, tongue, jaw, pharynx, larynx, glottis, lungs, diaphragm, and 144 other body parts. Counting is physical, like dancing and martial arts.

Muscles, nerves, tendons, joints;

movement, energy, flow, effort;

poise, pleasure, sound, silence.

To count is to breathe. It’s such a big subject that I’ll limit myself to a possibly helpful simplification: baby (perfect natural unconscious reflex), adult (awkward gasping asthmatic hyperventilation), master (perfect natural conscious reflex).

  • One, two, three . . . and I breathe, like a baby or like a master.

  • Four, five, six . . . and my ribs and lungs move of their own accord.

  • Seven, eight, nine . . . and I receive air, oxygen, prāna, and love.

  • Ten, eleven, twelve . . . and I’m ready to cry with happiness.

Chant your numbers calmly, at a very moderate pace, on a pitch that doesn’t change, taking sweet loving prosodic breaths after two, three, or four numbers. You have become a chanter in a sacred setting, regardless of who you are and where you are.

This exercise is part of “The 5-Minute Voice,” my series of clips for all comers addressing vocal creative health. Would you like to know more about it? Click here.

 ©2025, Pedro de Alcantara

Elopement

I got rejected, and I got accepted. It’s only a detail in my story!

From first intuition to ultimate crystallization, the creative process mirrors the larger processes of life itself. I think it’s useful to ponder their parallels, because it makes it easier to navigate their respective processes (with their inevitable bouts of rejection and acceptance, among many other joys and sorrows)!

I recently finished writing a new book: sixty thousand words, two hundred photos, 36 video clips; anecdotes, concepts, exercises. Hands, Wrists, Fingers: Creative Health for Musicians will be published by Anthem Press in a few months. This is acceptance, made visible and tangible!

Rejection came earlier, from another publisher who had doubts about the validity of the book and the philosophy it represented. Whaaaaaat, don’t you love me???

I’m teasing myself about being rejected, or about my feelings regarding rejection: it was the book proposal that got rejected, not my person. If you don’t put your neck out, the Big Taylor in the Sky won’t be able to Measure your Neck and Decide What Fits You Best. Old publisher, no fit; new publisher, yes fit! Thank you, Anthem Press! Thank you, Big Taylor in the Sky!

Rejection and acceptance don’t determine the primary direction of your projects (or your life). The projects want to go somewhere, and they take you there; life wants to go somewhere, and you follow the lead without paying too much attention to the hundred no’s and the hundred yeses. Listen to Life, not to the threshold guardians or the threshold pompom girls!

Early steps: you don’t know what you’re doing or why, and you really don’t know where you’ll end. Unsteady baby learning to walk: do you think she knows already what she’ll be doing in five days, five months, five years, or five decades? She doesn’t know, but she’ll find out. As Aristotle famously didn’t say, “Knowledge Prevents Exploration.” My book learned to crawl, then to toddle. Soon my book will learn to Dance the Liminal Tango with the Potential Reader (You)!

Investigation, discovery, joy, disappointment, recovery, acceptance, celebration. Then it starts again: investigation, discovery . . . I had an incredibly good time working on this project, but I’ve had to revise, change, revisit, delete, chuck, chuck, and chuck a lot of materials. And chucking didn’t always feel good. So with life! Oh, how hard it is to let go! Oh, how hard it is to embrace! Oh, how hard it is to choose what to embrace and what to let go! Have you already claimed your free membership in the Club for People who Find it Hard to Embrace and to Let Go? It’s free, I’m telling you! And it has many benefits!

Rhythm, pacing, timing. These concepts are related, maybe synonymous, maybe not. As regards a project, do you count the amount of time that you “think about it” or only the time that you “work on it”? The actual writing of my book took something like seven months. The thinking-about-it has taken decades; perhaps it had no beginning and will have no end. Like life, creative projects resist the boundaries of chronology. I recommend a playful embrace of the notion of rebirth. An hour, sixty minutes: that’s sixty rebirths. Life is Renewal, happening quick and slow at the same time; life is eternal rebirth. If you’re not reborn in the next 59 seconds, you need to see a doctor immediately!

Hey, have you noticed it? Every paragraph in this blog post ends with an exclamation mark! Including this one here!

To publish means “to make it public.” If you reveal the name of your neighbor’s cousin’s married lover, you’re publishing it. We’re all informal publishers, sharing insights, questions, and confidences. My wife has known me for thirty years, and I often tell her little things that she’s never suspected about me; to her I “publish” my tics, my frustrations, my regrets, my bad jokes, plus some strange hankerings and goals. My wife is my “public.” Once you realize that life is made of “publications,” then you can cope with a project coming to fruition and escaping your control, just like a bad joke escaping your mouth. Hands, Wrists, Fingers and I are eloping in August or September. It’s a secret! Please don’t publish it!

©2025, Pedro de Alcantara

Separation Anxiety

I recently parted with six of my drawings. In itself, this is a banal event of no consequence. And, in itself, this is a big deal, an exceptional and consequential event.

The drawings became the property of a marvelous musician whom I’ve known for fifteen or eighteen years and who’s been supporting me generously in my Patreon initiative. Technically, he bought the drawings. But, you know, artistic exchanges between sensitive creative souls who’ve known each other for a couple of decades don’t look and feel like commercial events.

All right, Pedro, someone bought six drawings of yours. And?

One of my grown-up nephews lives in LA and has a fine career as a studio musician and university teacher. When he was little—maybe five years old or so—he asked his mother (my sister) about what happened when someone died. His mother, hoping to reassure the child, said that the person in question would go to heaven. My nephew freaked out, and he cried unconsolably for the longest time. “I don’t want to go to heaven when I die,” he said again and again.

What I mean is that every human being has metaphysical inclinations—the desire to ask urgent questions for which there are no clear answers, questions about the meaning of life, about right and wrong, about beauty and truth, about space and time, about connection and separation. Like, dying is a sort of separation, isn’t it? But going to heaven is a sort of connection, isn’t it? “NOOOOOO!”

I think that the metaphysical dimension, or the meaning-of-life dimension, or the separation-and-connection dimension, always lurks behind our daily existence, our banal interactions, our hello-how-are-you, our another-coffee,-please.

My interest in art first arose in my bosom (men have bosoms????) when I was about 10 years old. In my hometown of São Paulo, a new museum went up: a beautiful building in a beautiful block in a beautiful avenue, right across from a small city park that holds remnants of the rain forest that ancestrally dominated the landscape of São Paulo. MASP (the Museu de Arte de São Paulo) was inaugurated in 1968, and you know what? The Queen herself came over to unveil the plaque that announced, “Here today a boy will start exploring his love of art, and let’s wish him luck!”

Image by Fernando Costa.

By the way, I’m not a monarchist; on the contrary. I’m not saying that Queen Elizabeth godmothered my art. She’s a mental trinket, I guess. An ornament in my story. May she rest in peace.

At MASP I took a course on the history of music. In the packed auditorium, a professor (the very charming and knowledgeable Walter Lourenção) told us interesting and meaningful things. I was maybe 15 years old, squiggly and zitty, the stereotypical disembodied loner. The professor played a recording of Renaissance music and asked the audience to name the instruments being used. Participants offered absurd impossibilities, the gamba, the harpsichord, the kazoo, what’s wrong with people! I raised my hand. “A sackbut, a regal, and a krummhorn,” I said. “That’s absolutely right,” the professor said. Six hundred ears and six hundred eyes turned toward me; a murmur arose. I’m probably making up a few of the details, but those three instruments (the regal butt and the crummy horn) are totally and truthfully true.

There was a film series; I discovered Buster Keaton. Concerts by first-class artists from all over the world, the tickets heavily subsidized. I heard Leonard Rose, I heard János Starker, I heard I Musici, I heard Ruggiero Ricci. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t familiar with them. The main thing is that I was entwining myself with art, music, film, architecture, urban design, and a thousand other monsters, deities, and trinkets, may she rest in peace.

I took part in a few concerts myself, playing in youth chamber orchestras. One day when I was semi-grown up and studying music in the US I played a cello-and-piano recital there. Oh glory! I didn’t play very well, but that’s only a detail. I was playing the same recital hall as Leonard Rose and János Starker.

MASP was a long digression in what I’m trying to tell you, which we could call “the metaphysics of the moment,” for instance the moment when you sell six drawings to a friend and supporter. The moment exists in a context or totality full of existential dimensions, in which time, destiny, choice, connection, and separation are always cooking in low heat and sometimes coming to a boil. The moment is banal (low heat); the moment isn’t banal (boiling hot).

Less than three years ago I got more seriously involved in making art, as you probably know from my blog posts. The involvement (which was born at MASP almost 60 years ago) has taken me places; not geographically, but artistically and metaphysically. I’ve explored techniques, styles, materials, themes; I’ve made a series of drawings inspired by the invention of writing, another series inspired by abstract cartographies, another series hinting at cosmographies.

Yep, it all sounds very pretentious, all regal butts and horns, all downright krummy!

The paradox is that I don’t take my person too seriously, and yet my artwork, though borne of playful exploration, is in fact rather substantial. It “exists,” by which I mean it has value, coherence, power, and beauty; it’s individually mine, and yet it flows from some source which is by no means mine. Me, not me; me, not me: paradox, may she rest in peace.

I’ve made many hundreds of drawings on different types and sizes of paper, using ink, gouache, charcoal sticks, Bic pens, markers, pencils, pastels, Crayola: the usual materials that millions of other people have used over the eons. In themselves my materials aren’t original.

I’ll use an approximative, symbolic number and say that I’ve made a thousand drawings in two and a half years. I have boxes and boxes of drawings. The size of regular office paper is called A4. The equivalent of two sheets of office paper is A3; four sheets, A2; eight sheets, A1. I have drawings in all these sizes.

My friend and supporter is getting six A3 drawings. Six; if I have a stock of a thousand, this is 0.6% of my output.

But looking through my collection and choosing these six drawings, I had a big bout of separation anxiety. I didn’t want to part with them. Or, as my nephew famously said, “NOOOOOOO!” My drawings were dying and going to heaven, and I wasn’t happy. (Exaggerations and distortions are part of the story, of course. Metaphysics isn’t fact-oriented.)

I have tools to deal with separation anxiety. I go “professional,” as it were; I go “adult,” so to speak; I “evacuate my feelings,” after a fashion. I employ procedures. I bring some of my boxes out from their storage; I go through the contents of each box quickly and make snap judgments: not this one, not this one, no, no, maybe this one. Six boxes of A3 drawings, each box informally gathering a theme or a material (gouache or ink, white paper or black paper, calligraphy or cartography). From each box I make a preselection of two, three, four, or more drawings. Then I start mixing and matching: this drawing from this pile, this other drawing from this other pile.

My wife Alexis (an artist herself) lends me her eye and her heart. And with her help I choose six drawings. Once the choice is made, I put them aside in a folder, and I restore all the boxes to in their safe hiding place; I do it quickly, “professionally, adult-ly,” because if I start thinking the separation anxiety will reassert itself and I’ll bawl like a five-year-old discovering the facts of life.

Immediately after choosing the six drawings and putting them aside, I decided to make some more art. It’s quite logical! You’re letting six orphans out of your orphanage, so you must, you must, you must generate six new orphans, because you don’t want the other 994 orphans to feel lonely, do you!

Although metaphysics isn’t fact-oriented, the fact is that creativity is infinite. The not-me source that granted me a thousand drawings is permanently ready to grant me as many drawings as I want, six or six hundred or six thousand. I don’t mean that I’m infinitely creative; I mean that the Creative Source is infinite, and as long as I’m available to its flow I’ll keep drawing and drawing and drawing.

And every time I’ll part with any one of my drawings, I’ll feel separation anxiety, a little or a lot. This, too, is a fact, perfectly banal and perfectly NOOOOOOOO!

 ©2025, Pedro de Alcantara

Good Luck!

Self, other, task, materials, processes. Good luck!

Did you know that Taylor Swift wrote a song about me? It goes like this: “The explainers gonna explain, explain, explain, explain, explain.” Good luck!

The self is you: your person, your indivisible body and mind and soul, your thoughts and feelings (and you might not be fully aware of all your thoughts and all your feelings), your history and your stories. If you and I sit across each other at the café, chatting and sharing a chocolate mousse, we’ll be “sitting across each other’s stories.” Good luck!

The other is anything that isn’t that self of yours. It can be another person, it can be an animal, it can be an entity that resides outside yourself although, technically speaking, your imagination and your heart might have a relationship with the entity or person or cat, and then the “other” kind of resides “in the self.” Good luck!

In other words, the separation between yourself and the rest of the universe is relative. According to some philosophers and mystics, also some quantum physicists and some poets, also some sources that wish to remain anonymous (including Alfred N. Whitehead, not to be confused with Alfred E. Newman), the universe is defined by the relationships that exist between yourself and the places, events, ideas, objects, and people with whom you interact—that is, the universe is a set of relationships. Good luck!

Should I carry on with my explanation? Yes, thank you. The task can be minuscule (wash a lettuce leaf) or enormous (write a book), but the main thing is that your life is made of a series of never-ending tasks—all day long, day after day. When you’re sitting across from me sharing a chocolate mousse, “your bundle of tasks” is sitting across “my bundle of tasks.” Good luck!

Every task comes with its materials, both physical and psychic. If my task is to learn a new piece at the piano, there’ll be the piano itself (which is “pregnant with my stories”), the score (also “pregnant”), the physical setting of my home or the rental studio where I’m “making myself pregnant with the piano and the score.” It takes two to tango and three to get pregnant. If my task is to help a student understand time signatures, syncopations, offbeats, and hemiolas (good luck!), the materials include a printed method, the entire edifice of the musical language, traditions and conventions, mathematics, prosody, infographics, and contraception. Good luck!

You want to achieve the task, to fulfill it, to accomplish it: to learn the new piano piece, for instance, or to make the salad. Then you’ll have no choice but to engage in multiple processes, including slicing a lemon but not slicing your fingers. You and I, chocolate mousse: it’s “your bundle of processes” sitting across “my bundle of processes.” Good luck!

Self, other, task, materials, processes. To accomplish a task is to work on yourself, to work on your relationship with the other, to handle the materials and processes demanded by the task. One Alfred said that that everything exists “in relation,” and nothing exists “in isolation.” Another Alfred said, “What, me worry?” Good luck!

©2025, Pedro de Alcantara

Hallelujah!

The other day I got thinking about the word “will.” I don’t mean the document determining who gets the manor house and who gets the cat after you die. I mean the determination to do something, the commitment and desire: “I have the will (to get out of bed),” as in the famous song. Its full title is “I have the will (to get out of bed) (but not yet, Lord) (it’s cozy under the blankets) (and I didn’t do the dishes last night) (or the night before) (so spare me Lord) (and I promise I’ll get out of bed) (before sunset) (unless, you know, I don’t) (Hallelujah)”.

How do you say “information in the form of a joke” in German? That is a joke in itself, but I digress. I meant to say that thinking about “will” is useful and urgent, because your relationship with determination, commitment, and desire affects many things in your life. You “decide you’re going to be a musician when you grow up,” for instance. This seems like an expression of your will: a conscious decision; a plan; an objective. You commit to lessons and workshops, you study, you go to rehearsals, you practice, learn, and perform; all of this flows from your will.

Your career, then, arises from the pondered choices that you make over the years and decades, sometimes starting quite early on in your life.

Unless, of course, things don’t work that way. Maybe you don’t “will” but “you’re willed.” Mysterious and unnamable forces outside your control and outside your intellectual awareness engineer strange situations, compelling encounters, fortuitous events. You find yourself vaguely exploring something without knowing why, and without having decided to explore it. You don’t understand what you’re doing, and you can’t quite explain it to your friends and family. Or your explanations don’t reflect the actuality of what you’re doing. Because you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.

And if you’re available to the mystery, open to the difficult-to-justify exploration, “willing not to will,” your life and your career take unexpected turns, seemingly illogical from a professional, financial, or familial point of view, and yet organic to your deeper self, of which you may or may not have a clear grasp.

There’s a stereotypical Hollywood mantra or exhortation, dispensed by parents toward their children in films and TV shows: “You can do anything you want! You can become anybody you want!” It’s a celebration of pragmatic, extraverted will and self-determination. “You can get out of bed! And you will! Because you want to conquer the world and become the best neurosurgeon in the history of humanity!”

Let’s sing another song. “Lord, I’m not sure I want to become (the best neurosurgeon in the history of humanity) (and I didn’t do the dishes last night) (but I had a weird dream) (and the arts supply store was offering discounts) (and I meant to buy a couple of pencils only) (but somehow I ended up buying a ton of gouache) (I have no idea what to do with the gouache) (Lord, you bought gouache on my behalf, didn’t you?) (and now you, Lord, you’re splattering gouache over this beautiful A3-sized paper with a grainy surface) (and I’m standing here, squeezing the tube of gouache) (sorry, Lord, I meant to say that you’re squeezing the tube on my behalf) (and, oh my Lord, look at these splodgy blobs in orange, black, yellow, and violet) (they’re gorgeous) (I need some chocolate) (Lord, there’s no chocolate left in the house) (why oh why) (the supermarket is a block away, Pedro) (but, Lord—) (Shut up, Pedro, or I’ll make you squeeze some more gouache on some more A3-sized paper with a grainy surface) (yay Lord) (Hallelujah!)”.

Leonard Cohen was onto something. I love his song “Stock up (on 70% dark chocolate) (just in case).”

©2025, Pedro de Alcantara

Krazy Kalendar

The calendar is a strange beast. Stars and planets are dancing in the infinite universe, and the calendar somehow must capture the rhythms of the dance and state, unequivocally, that this is 11:11 AM on Tuesday the 24th of December, 2024. Crazy! The inhabitants of Kiritimati say that it’s Wednesday. Our friends in New York City claim it’s 5:11 AM, much too early to have a metaphysical discussion about the calendar. And my siblings out there in Brazil say it’s not Tuesday at all but terça-feira.

The calendar is a liar, and only fools would take it for its word. Actually, let me rephrase this so that some of the fools walking the streets of Kinshasa (11:11 AM), Addis Ababa (1:11 PM), and Kathmandu (4:11 PM) don’t get mad at me.

There once was a man from Kathmandu,
Who thought he could dance like a guru.
But he tripped like a fool,
Fell right in the pool,
And now his best move is “peek-a-boo!”

(by Ch. George P. Tee)

The calendar is an abstraction, trying to capture and fix a shapeshifting entity called Time. We like the calendar; time zones have made the world much easier to navigate, literally and symbolically; it’s good to have labels like Tuesday and mardi and terça-feira and Dienstag and Jumanne to help us know where in the week we stand; it’s wonderful that the Mayan and the Gregorian and the Julian calendar don’t agree on anything. Maya says the future is now, Gregor says the future is tomorrow, Julius says “Pizzam pro Natale volumus.”

My apologies to the fools in Kabul (2:41 PM). This blog post is very confusing, just like the calendar. Someone is having an early breakfast in Caracas (6:11 AM) at the same time that someone else is having a late dinner in Adelaide (8:41 PM). It isn’t right, is it!

I grew up with the 24-hour clock. After twelve noon there comes 13:00. It makes you think, feel, breathe and live differently from someone who grew up with that AM / PM thing, where twelve noon is follow by 1 PM. What the hell, “one” comes after “twelve”? Can’t you count????

The calendar itself has no feelings, probably. Humans have feelings, probably or maybe even surely. I think I have feelings (which is what Descartes meant to say, but he wasn’t having a good day). Words like “solstice” make me sit up and take note. Equinox! Zenith! Nadir! I wish I knew exactly what they meant!

Let me give you two choices: (1) This blog post is talking about Christmas and New Year, and wishing you merry and happy. (2) This blog post is quite worrisome, Pedro. Are you okay? You don’t have to suffer just because your late mother was a psychiatrist. Call 1-800-MUSHROOMS.

 ©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

La inexplicable completitud

(This one is in Spanish, part of a new project of mine)

¿Cómo explicar el sentimiento de completitud? Es imposible, por muchas y buenas razones. La completitud es trascendente; el sentimiento habla tan alto que es mudo. Pero he aquí la paradoja: habiendo confesado que no sé, que no puedo explicar ni la completitud ni el sentimiento (este o cualquiera), alcanzo la libertad de hablar sin trabarme la lengua; quiero decir, ¡sin vergüenza! “No sé, y como sé que nada sé, me permito hablar libremente.” Vivo en París, mundo de arte, de historia, de sensorialidad. Todo el arte vive aquí, prácticamente a mi lado. El museo Carnavalet, a cinco minutos de mi casa, es una hermosísima enciclopedia de la historia de París. El Pompidou, a quince minutos, te propone un siglo de descubrimientos, invenciones y revoluciones modernas y contemporáneas. Iglesias, edificios, plazas, fachadas, patios, ventanas, puertas, esquinas: en sí misma, la ciudad es arte.

En uno de esos muchísimos museos maravillosos, acabo de conocer a una cierta Olga de Amaral, colombiana, una vieja artista sin edad. ¿Sabías que las palabras “texto” y “textil” vienen de la misma raíz etimológica? El textil es un mensaje escrito, compuesto, sentido, captado. Decir que Olga de Amaral es una artista del textil es verdad y mentira, porque no podemos explicar la completitud ni podemos darle un nombre a la encarnación de la completitud.

Texturas del textil: Arrugas, elevaciones, prominencias y montículos, puntos encajados en líneas, líneas encajadas en planos, el todo tridimensional y en movimiento sin moverse, los puntos hablando y cantando, las líneas recitando odas, los planos respirando.

Formas y colores, por supuesto. Pero no son formas fáciles, triviales o cotidianas, sino formas eternas, arquetípicas. Reconocemos los colores de los textiles: el dorado, el bermejo, el marrón del barro. Los colores también son eternos; son los colores del tiempo y del espacio, los colores del misterio de nuestra existencia. En las formas y colores de Olga —sí, sí, llamémosla Olga: nombre escandinavo derivado de Helga, que quiere decir “santa, bendita, sagrada”— vemos las formas del universo, de los campos, de la geometría (que significa “medida de la Tierra”). Vemos también fachadas, muros, paredes, paredones; vemos o presentimos construcciones, pero no construcciones urbanas o técnicas, sino la Idea de la Construcción. Captamos el espíritu de lo construido, captamos el espíritu del Constructor y de la Constructora.

En la obra de Olga no hay espacio ni separación entre el Constructor y la Constructora; el masculino y el femenino están sumergidos en la obra, presentes y ausentes. No, creo que es la obra la que está sumergida en lo ni-masculino ni-femenino, en lo “ambos-ningún”.

Ya te dije que no sé explicar la completitud; ya te dije que soy un sinvergüenza.

Olga es poeta, arquitecta, geómetra, cosmógrafa. Olga es la totalidad y los millares de detalles en la piel de la totalidad. Algunas de sus obras son gigantescas paredes de arte, murallas. Imagínate: una inmensa muralla hecha de pequeños ladrillos. Mientras construía su muralla, creo que Olga (“santa, bendita, sagrada”) besó delicadamente cada ladrillito antes de integrarlo en la obra. Olga es atención y concentración; Olga es disciplina y técnica; Olga es generosidad y amor.

Olga nos obliga a atestiguar la completitud. Olga ha probado que la completitud es posible. Hay algo amenazante en su obra, pues no podemos ignorar la completitud, la posibilidad de completitud, el deber de completitud. Me morí y renací, envuelto en los tejidos de Olga. Confieso que tuve y tengo miedo desde mi enfrentamiento con Olga; no sé qué hacer con mi súbita pequeñez balbuceante.

Olga de Amaral: Fondation Cartier (Paris), hasta el 16 marzo de 2025.

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara (texto y fotografías)

The Dance

Several years ago, I was riding the Paris metro at rush hour when a technical problem caused the train to stay put for many long minutes in a busy station. The platform got ever more crowded, and people inside the train and on the platform got ever more impatient. A blind woman on the platform started complaining loudly about the crowds, the delay, the unreliable metro, the idiots. Some people laughed with her, some people laughed at her. She was near the train door, and was about to board when the doors closed and caught the tip of her cane. She let out an anguished cry the likes of which I had never heard before and, thank God, haven’t heard since. This was partly out of the overall stress in the whole situation, but mostly because the cane was an extension of herself, a vital adaptation, a matter of survival. The train doors, snapping shut on the lady’s cane, had symbolically threatened to guillotine her.

Recently I bought a new cello bow. It was the culmination of a process lasting a lifetime. I got my first cello and bow when I was 12, which means 54 years ago. Back then I wasn’t thinking of becoming a musician, but “it was already written” that my life would unfold in a certain way (which was going to be neither linear nor straightforward). To begin with, cello lessons amounted to an informal, disorganized, and unstructured addition to my general education. That first cello of mine was made of plywood. My first bow was similarly unsophisticated. And so was I, shy and awkward, a disembodied brainiac, a boneless chicken, an ay-caramba missing a caramba or three.

Traditionally, on New Year’s Eve we children had to perform in front of the family, gathered at grandma’s apartment: sing, play, recite; a young cousin who didn’t have these skills performed a controlled stumble, like some feline falling off a boulder. Good job!

Playing for your family is one of the most discomfiting activities for a sensitive musician. Torture!

Now see the ay-caramba as a 13-year-old with malicious acne. The afternoon of New Year’s Eve, taking a break from practicing my cellistic squeaks in our living room, I carelessly put my bow down on the sofa, and my younger brother sat on it—not on purpose, not on purpose. In half it broke.

In half he broke. In half I broke. In half—

A desperate trip to a music shop downtown provided a short-term solution, and that evening I did my boneless chicken tango in front of the familiar executioners. Good job!

Over the subsequent years I got a better cello, then a better one still; I got a better bow, then a better one still. I grew up, followed my non-linear path, left Brazil behind, left things and people and ideas behind, embraced new things and people and ideas. Here I am.

The Portuguese landed in Brazil in 1500, though true exploration and conquest would only start decades later. The Brazilian Northeast region, relatively close to Portugal, was settled before the rest of the country. Its coast was home to a tree with reddish wood that was prized in the preparation of textile dyes and suchlike. The Portuguese word for “embers” is “brasa.” The tree that yields the ember-colored wood is called “pau-brasil.” The country’s name is, in fact, a reference to this very tree; Brazil is “ember-like.” In English, the tree is known as “pernambuco,” after the state in the Northeast region where the tree used to be abundant.

A bow makes a huge difference in string playing. Sound, resonance, color palette, power, beauty, ease: everything is affected. European bow makers figured out that pernambuco made for excellent bows: resilient, flexible yet resistant, lively, vibrant. A cheap carbon-fiber bow costs fifty dollars; the most expensive bows, used by first-class concert artists and prized by collectors, sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars and are necessarily made of pernambuco.

In the 1980s Brazil had a period of hyperinflation, up to 2,500% per year. Prices and salaries were upside-down; nobody could determine the intrinsic value or cost of a  thing. Circumstances allowed me to buy (from two Brazilian musicians who were going into retirement) two superb pernambuco bows for very low prices, if you calculated the prices in dollars. Those two bows sustained my cello playing for 40 years.

They’re gone. I sold them. I’ll never see them again. Adieu, Victor! Adieu, Dominique! Thank you so much!

To replace them I bought a fiber-carbon bow, not a fifty-buck cheapo but a super-excellent, marvelous, wonderful, delightful, precious, fantastic, delicious bow designed and manufactured by Bernd Müsing in Germany. Unbelievable. Wow.

Many objects in our lives are extensions of ourselves, often enhancing a biological function. Clothes are an extension of our skin; they are an exo-skin, as it were, protecting us from the elements and keeping us comfortable and healthy. Eyeglasses are an extension of our eyes, helping us see better and function more easily. Forks are a continuation of our hands and fingers. Bikes and cars increase the range of our locomotion.

Extensions aren’t free from risks and dangers. We could (couldn’t we!) talk about what an ecological and geopolitical disaster cars have become over the decades. Cities and whole cultures sometimes are car-centric, at the expense of humans and pedestrians and the general quality of life of the cities and cultures concerned. The car-as-an-extension was created to help us, but at some point it took a life of its own and turned against us. Without realizing it, many people venerate the extension, transferring their affections, their loyalties, even their love away from deeply held, organic existential principles, and toward the extension.

The blind lady and her cane; the cellist and his bow. Her cane is her sight and her life; my bow is my breath and my voice. It wasn’t easy to let go of the two incredible pernambuco bows that extended my voice for so long. But you know how it is: in your path forward, you let go of people, places, things, and ideas; and you embrace new people, places, things, and ideas. Your relationship with your very self changes constantly; and your relationship with the extensions that are part of yourself also changes constantly. There exist slow changes, fast ones; smooth, abrupt; easy, difficult; constructive, destructive. But we might say that the whole of life is a dance of let-go and embrace.

My new bow . . . wow. I’ve never played better, I’ve never sounded better, I’ve never felt better. Wow. I embrace!

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

Backstage Tour

I recently completed another creative project: the 5-Minute Voice, a series of 52 video clips introducing concepts and exercises for you to play with your voice. In celebration of its publication, I thought I’d share its metaphysical backstage with you.

Warning! This post is right-brained and full of jokey non-sequiturs. If you prefer to read a sober-minded description of the 5-Minute Voice, click here.

The mother of a creative project is Mystery, and the father is Curiosity. You think you have some clear, ostensible reason to do something, a well-defined practical goal. But what really moves you forward probably lies outside your intellectual consciousness. Don’t get me wrong: It’s good to have well-defined goals. But it’s also good to “allow the stinky fumes of intuition to mingle with the fresh air of the well-ventilated workshop.”

The 5-Minute Voice was likely born when I was born and let out my first whimper (“Why me, oh mother?”). Then it was born again when I was in college and a solfège teacher complimented me on my voice and invited me to take part in a Sunday service at the church where he played the organ. Then it was born again when I trained in the Alexander Technique (a philosophy that was born of its founder’s vocal troubles), at which time I also took my first actual singing lessons with the late Roy Hickman of Elephant & Castle. Then it was born again when I started taking singing lessons with the late Cornelius L. Reid of West End Avenue. Then it was born again when Cornelius passed away and “I became my own voice teacher, for better and for worse.” Then it was born again in 2017, when I produced an early round of 52 vocal clips which should have been subtitled “Maybe.” And today it’s now reborn as a thing-in-itself and a culmination-in-progress (“Oh mother, why me?”).

A creative project might undergo multiple iterations. You achieve a version, you like it very much, you share it with the world, the world appreciates your efforts. Then somehow you go deeper into the project’s potentialities, and you come up with quite a different version—the “final” one. And sometime later you see that your final version is a stepping stone, a necessary and inevitable approximation. “Creativity likes movement and distrusts finality.” This year I turned 66. I may have another 15 or 20 years left on this earth to create another few versions of the 52. Then I’ll revise the 52 Infinitely And For All Eternity, unless the maggots get me first.

Amazingly, even in Infinite Eternity the 52 will have its flaws, its incoherences, its blind spots, its zits in its bits. “Creativity is perfect in herself; a creative project is imperfect in himself.” “Don’t confuse the two.” “What’s with the quotation marks, Pedro?” I mean, it’s good to work to high standards, but it’s also urgently good to agree to the Imperfectus of life and of human beings. Two perfectionists met in a bar. They didn’t get along.

What’s the Supply Chain Pyramid of a creative project?

Receive an inkling

Sit with it for a while

Play with it, poke it with a long stick

Play with it, poke it with a short stick so help me God

Sketch it, and give yourself permission to be laughably incompetent

Computer, software, camera, tripod, microphone, shower and shave, shirt,

press the button, perform, perform redundancy just in case, hydrate, nap, walk

Edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit

Publish and go hide

Let me explain, so-called. “To bypass the inkling is to chew gum with your nose.” Try it. And record yourself doing it, I’d like to see how it works. “Long stick short stick makes a project tick.” The Creative Cemetery has multiple tombstones with the following epitaph carved in granite: “Poked the project with the short stick too soon.” The camera, tripod, and all the rest are totally secondary, even though you can’t finish the project without them. Redundancy helps a lot. Make and record the same mistake seven times, then choose one of the seven as “the work of art.”

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

Your mind is framed

Our lives are intertwined with our projects. It’s difficult to define the word “project,” because it can mean an obligation, a choice, an objective in your career, a creative impulse, the decision to start a family, and many other things. Allow me to simplify and complicate the issue by defining a project as an undertaking on a forward path.

Flow counts for a lot. You don’t want the project to stall. A clear path is preferable to a blocked one, and the ability to overcome obstacles on the forward path is vital. Project management is a big deal, whether the project is to build a skyscraper, help a child apply for college, or write a blog post.

It’s important to be practical-minded when managing a project. Laying out plans, making lists, keeping track of the steps you’re taking: good and neccessary. But “practice” for the practical-minded is only as good as “the frame of mind” of the practical-minded (or, as Descartes never said, “l'état d'esprit de l'esprit pratique”).

Here it is: the famous frame-of-mind list that Decartes didn’t publish in 1652, two years after his untimely death. Abridged and updated.

  1. Everything depends on “allowed, not allowed.” Do I allow myself to invest time and effort in a project? Is the project useful, to me and to others? Is it a priority, or is it a waste of energy and money? Who am I to write a book? If you don’t allow yourself to start the project, you never will. It seems obvious, but when you’re in the middle of doubt and confusion you might not see how “allowed, not allowed” is clogging up the path forward.

  2. How will it turn out? It’s often difficult, if not impossible, to know how things will unfold and how the project will conclude. It’s relatively easy to make a baby, but—no, you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Accept the unpredictable, the uncertain, the unclear, the un-manythings (to coin an expression), or you’re cooked and the project might sink. Believe it or not, Descartes actually said “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.”

  3. A paradox is “two opposites, both true.” Life-as-project is full of paradoxes: I want to, I don’t want to; I own the project, the project owns me; I’m okay with it, I’m not okay with it; the project is going forward, the project is stalled; I’m a genius, I’m an idiot. Both are true. Project management is paradox management.

  4. Commitment and distance, at the same time (ay, paradox!). Too close to the project, and you can’t see it as a whole; the details overwhelm you, your emotions cloud your judgment. Too removed from the project, and the thing seems meaningless. Here comes a throwaway remark that I’ll not explain: “Perspective is humor, humor is perspective.”

  5. It takes courage to finish a project, and it takes courage to abandon a project. Since projects are investments in your future, abandoning one can feel like a threat to the continuity of life (“project management as telenovela”). In college, I had an insight about Mozart, and I thought I’d compose a series of beautiful and challenging études for solo cello. It’s been 45 years since I self-planted that self-seed on my self-brain, and I have yet to abandon the project even though I’ve spent no more than 22 and a half minutes on it, or roughly thirty seconds per year.

  6. Your definition of success and failure determines success or failure. Also, temporary failure is often a stepping stone to success. Also, you may feel that you’ve failed when you’ve actually succeeded, and you may feel that you’ve succeeded when you‘ve actually failed. Also, other people have diverging opinions about your failures and successes. Also, it’s generally better to put a little space between yourself and failure. Also, it’s generally better to put a little space between yourself and success.

  7. How long does a project take? Technically, making a baby only takes a few seconds. Don’t let that fool you.

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

How long?

How long does it take to peel a banana?

You think you know, don’t you!!!!!

Maybe you’re holding a banana plus the twins in your arms, one is puking, the other one is pooping (these are the twins, not the banana), and your husband, standing safely away from the six of you (wife, twins, banana, puke, poop), is telling you about his massage therapist. You won’t peel the banana; you’ll strangle it.

Bride and groom at a German wedding. The tradition is to tie the two of them together back to back, stuff a banana in the groom’s pants, and hang the couple (and the banana) upside down from the ceiling in a barn in Westphalia, with cow dung piled deep underneath the couple so that if they fall down while trying to peel the banana, they’ll bond forever. Google “divorce rate Wesphalia.” The statistics will surprise you.

 In North Rhine-Westphalia, the number of divorces decreased by 43%

Divorce rates in North Rhine-Westphalia have dropped 43% in the last two decades, according to a statement from the State Office for Statistics in Düsseldorf. In 2021, they estimate that around 29,000 marriages would've ended in divorce, out of which 304 couples were of the same sex. In comparison, there were over 51,000 divorces in 2004.

The President-for-Life of Banana Republic has passed away, may he rest in peace. A month of official mourning has been decreed, and no bananas are allowed in or out of the country until his widow has safely landed in Switzerland. You can’t peel a banana if you don’t have a banana. A lot will depend on the immigration authorities.

And what if you’re phobic about bananas? Horrible disgusting stinky mushy ugly selfish so-called “fruits.” You may need years of therapy before you peel a banana, and years of therapy after you peel a banana (if you peel a banana). A phobia is a phobia (“fear and hatred, combined”), and maybe you don’t have a banana phobia, but let’s spend a little time together and I’ll know for sure that you have a phobia or seven, or perhaps even a “phobia of seven” (heptaphobia).

Let me ask again, and let me propose a truthful answer.

How long does it take to peel a banana?

As long as it takes.

Context, situation, psychology, family dynamics, geopolitics, chemistry, and a thousand other factors make it impossible to predict how long it takes to peel a banana. Or to do any one thing.

How long does it take to learn a foreign language? As long as it takes. How long does it take to bring peace to the world? As long as it takes. How long does it take to write a blog post? As long as it takes. How long does it take for you to understand how long it takes for anyone to do anything? As long as it takes.

How long does it take to heal from childhood trauma? How long does a baseball game take? How long does it take to walk down two flights of stairs? How long did it take James Joyce to write Finnegans Wake? (Seventeen years.) How long does it take to read it?

Okay, I’m confusing Finnegans Wake with a banana. But that doesn’t change anything. The principle is absolute, and it says, absolutely, “As long as it takes. Nanoseconds, millennia.”

A banana shouldn’t take that long to peel, I hear you say. Oh yeah? “Should” makes things go more slowly; “should” leads to mistakes that take forever to fix; “should” doesn’t understand German weddings; “should” and “banana” are mortal enemies. You want to finish your doctoral thesis? Choose between “should” and “banana.” With crunchy peanut butter, yum! 

I asked ChatGPT to write a parody of Finnegans Wake on the subject of a banana with crunchy peanut butter. It took less than four seconds. How long will it take us to convince Disney to make a movie based on it? Nanoseconds, millennia.

Bananagins Wake

Riverrun, past Eve's and Adam's, from swerve of lush jungle to crunch of nutty lands, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Bananaville and crunchy’s lair.

Peanut butterly, by gum, the crunchcrack smackdown of the peanut podge! O, how the slipskin shimmies, in its yellow frock, undressing itself like a flirty fruit! O, how the crunchy clings to the ripe and the ready, as if to say, “Let us go then, you and I, when the day is spread out against the banana sky.”

The banana, sure, was a riddle in the middle of a jittery split, not unlike the wearisome woes of the ould Finn again, but now swaddled in the nutty cocoon, and dreams of peanutty plunder, dreaming to the crunch of a thousand nuts.

Here comes the spread of the ages, butter upon butter, crunch upon crunch, and never a spoon to part them! “Loquacious!” cried the peel, “Forthwith! Let the knobbly knell ring forth!” And they did crunch, and they did butter, and there was much rejoicing in the house of spread.

For wasn’t it the slap and crackle of the night, when the moon shone bright upon the hunch of the brunch? In the jungle's gloaming, there’s the peel of the laugh and the chuckle of the grind, the swirl of the peanut pool, a symphony in snack major!

O, looksee now the slippery skin, as it wends its way, forlorn and forsaken, the banana’s other half, and crunches it nevermore. O the lamentations, O the peel unpeeling into the mists of tomorrow, as the jar sits ajar, and the butter goes soft.

 ©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

A Country Called Story

Paris isn’t a city, but a universe. The city is divided into 20 arrondissements, traditionally organized and numbered as a sort of spiral or escargot. Every arrondissement is divided into four quarters, which the French of course call quartiers. Twenty arrondissements, four quartiers per arrondissement, 80 named neighborhoods. It’s not too much of a stretch to see Paris as 80 villages glued together. And each village is full of history and architecture, hidden corners and courtyards, secrets and mysteries, wonders and miracles.

Paris the universe is multilayered. Food and wine? Yes, explore this dimension as a full-time job, and you’ll never exhaust all its possibilities. Architecture? Thousands of buildings in every style, and interesting new buildings coming up every year. Fashion; urban planning; public transportation; cinema; theater: the word “thousands” apply to every dimension, as in thousands of details, thousands of possibilities, thousands of discoveries.

But this post isn’t about Paris per se, but about Émile Salimov. We’ll get to him soon enough, but first let’s mention that art is one of those incredible dimensions of the incredible universe of the incredible 80 villages. Two dozen world-class museums; another four dozen lesser museums of great charm; dozens and dozens of art galleries; dozens and dozens and dozens of ateliers where dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of artists of every stripe spend their days in creative exploration.

One of the villages in Paris is called Belleville, out in the 20th arrondissement northeast of the city center. Immigrants from all over the world living in a swirl of action and color, of languages and sounds, of hopes and fears.

Belleville organizes a yearly open-house weekend, during which you can visit the ateliers of some of its working artists. This year there were 156 participating ateliers. You get a map, and you walk here and there, you enter courtyards, you find secret doors, you enter, and you see. And you chat with the artists, many of whom have much to say.

It's overwhelming.

My wife Alexis and I went out there on a sunny Saturday afternoon, walking all the way from our home near the Bastille and the Place des Vosges. (Technically our own village is called La Roquette.) To choose from a menu of 156 possibilities, give up any pretension of discernment and just go somewhere, then somewhere else, then somewhere else.

We had a good and a great time. Every second courtyard was gorgeous; every second city block was fascinating; every second shop window was a festival of visual and olfactory stimulation. Some of the artists’ ateliers were wonderful spaces that made us salivate, real-estate-wise.

And some of the art was touching, interesting, clever, stimulating. Or annoying and distracting. Or oy-vey-ay-caramba-oh-la-la-mein-Gott-get-me-out-of-here.

Art is art. It’s not possible to say brief, original, and meaningful things about what art is or what art should be (and I’m using the word “should” as a joke). Instead, let me say something general and vague, coming from the village of Useless. Art can be a quest for expression or a quest for connection. The quest for connection is, in itself, a form of expression. But not every quest for expression leads to connection. Expression might be summarized like this: “I made this. Look at me.” Connection is more difficult to explain, but it arises from the timeless and mysterious, the ambiguous and paradoxical: “I made this, and this made me. You don’t need to look at me at all; instead, look at this.” Now a connection is established—with the creative source, with eternal myths, fables and stories; with nature and the workings of Space-and-Time; with archetypes, with structures, with inklings; with ineffable principles that we can’t describe or even name.

Our randomized meanderings through Belleville led us to a modest apartment in a modest corner on the edge of anonymity. Entering it, we immediately knew that we had passed from the world of expression to the world of connection; from the world of I-made-this to the world of this-made-me. It was magical.

Meet Émile Salimov. Look him up on Wikipedia, and you’ll see that he’s a theater man from a faraway place called Azerbaijan-Russia-USSR-France-Here. The place has specific cultural and linguistic characteristics, and yet it could also be called Nowhere Somewhere Everywhere: its language is Story; its culture is Love; we all live in it, although some of us aren’t alert to our shared nationality.

Émile Salimov is alert to it, and also to It. (Uppercase changes mere physics to Metaphysics.) If you look at his art you’ll also become alert to it, and to It. His art will remind you of things you’ve always known but have forgotten or neglected; his art will turn you into a child, and an enlightened adult, and a child; his art will make you want to read, listen to music, sing, learn languages, travel, go for nature walks, have strange dreams at night, open up, absorb, integrate, and Become a Citizen of the Country called Story.

This is perhaps only a detail, but Salimov’s art happens to be very skillfully created. High-grade markers that penetrate and transform paper; thought and care; patience and discipline; form and color, form and color, form and color.

After we saw Salimov’s collection we walked straight home. It didn’t seem right to seek other urban or artistic experiences. The day after, I felt compelled to return to his show and to spend more time looking at his work and talking to him. There were 155 other artists clamoring for my attention, but the quest for connection had taken me where I needed to be.

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

The Inevitable Self-Portrait

Warning! I’m about to make an absolute and dogmatic statement:

Everything is a Self-Portrait.

Think of people you know: their clothes offer us a self-portrait revealing their tastes, their personalities, their histories and stories. Their homes, their jobs; their sets of friends; their voices, their smells: Everything is a Self-Portrait. Friend A would never, ever wear those clothes that fit Friend B so well. Friend C smells of garlic and cigarettes, friend D of toothpaste and oh-I-hate-garlic-so-much. Toothpaste is a Self-Portrait, Therefore Everything is a Self-Portrait.

Point taken!

With some training, you can see a work of art for the first time and know, know, know exactly who created it: Rembrandt, Picasso, Matisse, O’Keefe; the painting’s subject is immaterial; Picasso’s work doesn’t look like O’Keefe’s, and vice versa; Picasso’s famous drawing of Igor Stravinsky could be called “Picasso’s Self-Portrait, in the guise of Stravinsky.”

My recent birthday coincided with a session of my Drawing Lab. I thought I’d have fun at my own expense—probably the best way to celebrate any one thing, and particularly one’s own birthday. I told my students that they’d draw nothing but portraits of me, me, ME! I’d do quick poses (for quick don’t-think-drawings), slow poses, poses wearing strange garments. And we’d also copy or transform or maim photos of me as a child, as an adolescent, as a young man holding a Siamese cat. Plus, we’d take works of art by canonical artists and use them as a “background canvas” on which we’d draw my portrait.

Yes, you guessed it right: my students inevitably drew their own self-portraits. And you also guessed right: their drawings all capture some dimension of me, some detail or some echo of some essence, some je-ne-sais-quoi (which is French for “you don’t quite look like Gregory Peck or Paul Newman, did you know that, Pedro? Didn’t you know that plastic surgery wasn’t going to help you, far from it? You took out a BANK LOAN from a SHARK???? And THOSE are the RESULTS of the SURGERY??????”).

Two of my students are brother and sister—I mean, not little kids but grown-ups, so-called! They compete; say no more! I’ll call them “B” and “K.” And I myself am called “P.” On my birthday Drawing Lab I too drew self-portraits (which were self-portraits, inevitably). I’ll ask my wife if I’m a grown-up, and one day I’ll spin her answer into a blog post or lullaby. Or dirge, depending on what she says.

Here’s my adolescent self. From left to right, the original (“O”), then K, B, and P.

Here’s my portrait as inspired by a Matisse drawing.

Forty years ago, holding my late mother’s late cat.

The German artist Georg Baselitz is famous for painting and drawing upside-down portraits. I offered my students an upside-down photo of my sweet self as a canvas.

To a portrait by Rembrandt I layered an image of myself kinda dressed like an old lady wearing a shawl.

Another student is called “M.”Guess who she drew on my birthday! The slide show includes a couple of clues. You’ll know exactly who she drew.

What can you learn from these birthday hallucinations?

  1. Don’t take yourself too seriously.

  2. People look at you, and without realizing it they create, in their minds, their own self-portrait “as you.”

  3. You do the same thing, all the time! Your thoughts, images, memories, and opinions are all self-portraits in a vast Subjective Museum With a Musty Basement Prone to Frequent Flooding.

  4. Highly developed art skills won’t save you from drawing inevitable self-portraits. “Remember Rembrandt.”

  5. Gregory Peck probably didn’t take himself too seriously.

  6. You don’t look like Gregory Peck.

  7. Neither did Paul Newman.

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

Turning Point

Certain themes have interested me for decades. I consider these themes archetypal: representative of profound existential dimensions that we might call eternal and universal.

Two of them have been pushing and pulling at each other.

The first is the subway, and more specifically the New York subway system. I started riding it in 1977, when I arrived in town as a scaredy-cat 19-year-old foreign student. I lived on-campus in Westchester, north of New York City proper, but I came into the city every week. I took a train from White Plains to Grand Central Station, then the shuttle to Times Square, then the C uptown to West 87th street where I took my cello lessons.

The subway was a dangerous place, difficult to navigate, unreliable, hostile. Incomprehensible announcements, a local suddenly becoming express without your realizing it, pushing a cello case through a turnstile that looked like a gigantic meat slicer . . . It was an underworld representing descent, getting lost, facing the risk of death, and also “traveling somewhere important.” It was incredible to enter it, and incredible to exit it.

I was too young to grasp the archetypal dimensions of the experience, but the sensations and emotions left a deep imprint. Every year, and multiple times a year, I have unsettling dreams about the subway: mysterious interchanges, wrong platforms, unfamiliar maps, no money to buy tokens and fares, depots where they shouldn’t be and where I myself shouldn’t be, everything taking place late at night.

The New York subway system today isn’t what it was in 1977. It has become less dangerous and less mysterious, but no less wonderful. The archetypal dimensions remain: stairways, entrances and exits, tunnels, tracks, announcements, train cars packed with strangers forced into intimacy, all accompanied by a rich soundscape mixing machinery and humanery, to coin a term.

I wrote a time-travel novel for young readers where the New York subway system is the vessel of time travel. Titled Backtracked, it was published by Delacorte Press in 2009. Researching it, I traveled far and wide within the system, making endless discoveries. Lines I had never taken in the past, gritty little stations in the middle of nowhere, elevated tracks going to the far reaches of northern Manhattan, mosaics as beautiful and as elaborate as those in Ravenna, buskers, “New York characters” (“certified nutcases”), an endless teeming festival of bodies and souls. I’m not the first person to fall in love with the subway, and I won’t be the last either.

The second theme, seemingly unrelated to the first, is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. You may be familiar with the story: Orpheus, a musician, marries his muse Eurydice. On the afternoon of their wedding she dies. Heartbroken, Orpheus sets out to the underworld, where he’ll attempt to retrieve Eurydice and bring her back “to this world of ours.” He’ll have to cross the river Styx, charm the guardians of the underworld, and earn Eurydice’s freedom with his music-making. The king of the underworld, touched by Orpheus’s music and his devotion to his wife and muse, allows him to retrieve Eurydice . . . under one condition.

The story doesn’t have a happy end.

For musicians, the myth of Orpheus is intriguing because it hints at the transformative and shamanic potential of music. Through his singing and playing, Orpheus could tame ferocious beasts and make stones cry. Perhaps belatedly, Orpheus comes to see Eurydice as his source of inspiration, his connection with the creative source (which is his own feminine dimension). When Eurydice dies, Orpheus himself is in mortal danger, hence his desperate quest.

I composed a 65-minute song cycle inspired by the myth, scoring it for pizzicato cello in scordatura, piano, voice, and whistling. I performed all parts myself, in a sort of shamanic one-man show where I’m Orpheus telling the world about my archetypal journey and its tragic end. The cycle is titled “Don’t Look Back.”

I pursued the Orpheus theme with another project in a different medium. In 2017 I found myself taking snapshots within the Paris metro system, which I ride frequently. The Paris metro is tidier and better behaved than the New York subway, but it shares the archetypal characteristics of its New York cousin. Over a few months, I took thousands of snapshots and shared some of them on social media. Gradually, it dawned upon me that my images could be read as a mysterious wordless narrative: Orpheus looking for Eurydice in an immense labyrinth of interconnected tracks, tunnels, stairs, corridors, signs and omens, the whole labyrinth peopled by a vast nameless population. You ride the metro or the subway with a different heart when you imagine you’re incessantly looking for your lost love. Retroactively, I titled the project “She was Here.” I don’t know yet what, if anything, I’ll do with these images, but a possibility is to write a novel or a cycle of poems in Spanish, a language I’ve been exploring rather fruitfully in recent years, and illustrate the text with the photos.

These projects—my New York subway novel Backtracked, my song cycle “Don’t Look Back,” and my photo narrative “She was Here”—have become intertwined and given birth to a novel inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set inside the New York subway system and titled Turning Point. Gabriel, a singer-songwriter living in Brooklyn, marries his muse Noï. During their intimate wedding party she disappears, and Gabriel intuits that she’s dead and not dead, having gone or been taken to the underworld of the New York subway system. He sets out to find her and to bring her back. I drafted the novel during the COVID confinement of November, 2020, that mysterious and marvelous time during which we introverts got a lot of things done.

And here it is today. I’ll publish Turning Point in 12 monthly installments, illustrated with some of my abstract drawings in ink and gouache and also with songs for voice, guitar, and whistle, alone and in combination—songs composed “as if” by the novel’s narrator and protagonist.

I chose to publish it through a Patreon page. Patreon is a sort of subscription system for creatives and their readers, listeners, and collectors. The creatives share their work, and the appreciative readers and listeners make monthly contributions. The system allows for different types of involvement, from informal to intense, from inexpensive to substantial. By subscribing to my Patreon page you can enjoy my writings (including Turning Point), my audio and video clips, my online courses (including The 5-Minute Voice series of 52 video clips), and my talks and masterclasses. And you might want to start collecting my artwork as well. All of this is nicely organized through Patreon.

You can go directly to my Patreon page and figure it out for yourself. Or you can visit this dedicated page here on my website, where I explain how it works.

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

The Mystery

  1. Mystery is just another name for superstition. I don’t understand how you, such an intelligent human being, can’t see that.

  2. I wake up to Mystery and I spend my day in Mystery and I fall asleep to Mystery. Mystery is Beauty and Meaning.

  3. Wait, aren’t you even going to try to define Mystery?

  4. I fear Mystery. I can’t explain it.

  5. It’s a well-known fact that there are four types of Mystery: existential, psychological, situational, and biological.

  6. In Septuagint the word Mystery meant “secret counsel of God.” In Vulgate it was translated as sacramentum.

  7. Oh yeah, I love a good Mystery. I’m always dying to find out who killed the stupid idiot.

  8. I don’t understand the first thing about mathematics. It’s a Mystery.

  9. Mystery is First and Last, Alpha and Omega, Yin and Yang, Heaven and Earth.

  10. Take the Mystery out of it, and all the fun is gone.

  11. Mystery gives, and Mystery takes away. We don’t know why, and we can’t know why.

  12. There’s mystery, and then there’s Mystery. Don’t confuse the two.

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara