Questionable Cookies

12 Questionable Fortune Cookies from the Mistake Pavilion Restaurant and Teahouse

  1. Are today’s mistakes better than yesterday’s?

  2. Would you make a fatal mistake on purpose if it saved the life of your loved ones?

  3. What do you prefer, making zero mistakes or making a thousand mistakes?

  4. Can a newborn make mistakes?

  5. Are mistakes Instagrammable?

  6. Is it a crime to strangle a mistake and spit on its grave?

  7. What tools do you need to make mistakes with?

  8. If you let go of a mistake, where does it end up?

  9. Why did the mistake cross the road?

  10. Is it a mistake to ask this question?

  11. If a mistake calls, do you answer?

  12. Is there a discount if you buy mistakes by the dozen?

©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

Swimming in the whole

The creative process is a totality. Some people might call it a whole world. Pretentious intellectuals like me like calling it a Gestalt, which is the same as a totality but the word has nice echoes, connotations, imaginings. You can take the Autobahn from Gestalt to Bauhaus.

When the totality doesn’t completely envelop your creative efforts, you’re likely to come up with crappy results. If, however, you dwell in the totality, results are, in themselves, secondary—and likely to be quite satisfying.

A young child digging a hole in a sandbox is immersed in the totality, and for this reason we find the child terribly lovable, worthy of veneration. The hole is secondary, but fascinating were you to analyze it. But let’s leave the hole aside and notice the totality. There’s the environment (a sandbox in a city park, late afternoon in summer); the materials of the creative work (bucket, scoop, sand); the commitment and investment of the young child in pursuing a goal (digging, digging, digging a hole); the psychomotor presence of the child, barefoot and in a deep squat (the animal living in space and time); the paradoxical mixture of “I’m just playing” and “This is serious business” (serious business); the silent stories that the child is telling herself and has been telling herself ever since she told herself her First Story (Indiana Jones); and the elemental, symbolic nature of the act (sand, sandbox, beach, desert, caravan, thirst, mirage, oasis, infinity, eternity). All of it is happening at the same time: it’s not a linear sequence (this, then that), but a kaleidoscopic amalgamation of all dimensions into a Gestalt (Autobahn).

It doesn’t matter in what domain you pursue the creative process: visual arts, music, writing, cooking, architecture, professional therapeutic work, politics, mathematics, brain surgery, TikTok. In the totality you shall find meaning, direction, and practical results. Not in the totality? Your brain-surgery patient will be “accidentally” lobotomized. By you, of course.

I recently added a domain to my creative pursuit: drawing with brush and ink. It’s a natural development within my drawing explorations, but it’s a new thing for me. If ever I did anything with brush and ink, it might have happened in seventh grade but I have no memory of it whatsoever. Therefore, it never happened! Ever, whatsoever, never!

It’s a new thing, I’m telling you.

There’s an art-supply store about five or seven minutes’ walk from my home. It’s packed, packed! with everything, everything! that I might want or need for an art project, art project! Sometimes I go there to buy nothing but a pencil—just to go there and to soak in its atmosphere and to dream of colors and shapes. I went in and chose an A2 sketchbook, on sale at 5 euros which is 5 dollars. 25 sheets of white paper, each sheet already an art work, practically by birth. A2 is the equivalent of four sheets of office paper: smaller than the Himalayas, but larger than a ladybug. I needed a brush. I have no experience with brushes, with using them, or with buying them. What kind, how big, how small, how expensive? I don’t know! The store has hundreds of brushes to choose from! Which one? I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know know know! And I picked one, medium sized, inexpensive: ultimately, it doesn’t matter which brush I get, because I’m just entering the maze and any portal will do. The main thing is to pass through and go in. Overthinking your choices can be nicht-Gestalt, so to speak.

I approached the manager to ask her about ink. French friendliness is different from American or Brazilian friendliness. The manager is somewhat serious, like a schoolteacher about to give you a grade lower than you expect. But I think it’s a façade: I bet she’s the archetypical schoolteacher who really cares for the kids in class, but who doesn’t externalize her caring because she risks crying with too much love. She’s direct and clear, businesslike. Showing her my brush, I said to her, “I don’t know what I want, I don’t know if you have it, and I don’t know where it’d be if you have it.” I mimicked sticking the brush into an invisible pot of ink, stirred it, and provided a slurpy splashy soundtrack. She understood me to perfection. She walked me to the corner of the store where the inks hid in plain sight, and she suggested an inexpensive pot of black ink appropriate for my learnings. I asked her, “Do I have the right to adore you?” She laughed briefly, then said, “Sure, I like it when people adore me.” I paid and left. Paper, brush, ink, and the help of a benevolent goddess in finding it all. Plus, a story that is meaningful to me and that will be forever associated with my brush-and-ink explorations.

Materials, discovery, pleasure, adoration. Territory, exploration, orientation, pleasure, joy. Adoration. Repeat yourself deliriously when you’re having a spiritual breakthrough: pleasure, joy, adoration.

Did you know that ink has a staining property? Blotch, splotch, fleck, speck, early death, crematorium. There’s no way I could blotch my wife, I mean, my home, my golden carpet, my babies, my cats, my cello, my piano, my heirlooms, or my wedding dress (some items on this list are fictional). I decided to go draw in my courtyard downstairs. I put on a pair of gym shorts and an old T-shirt, and barefoot to the courtyard I went.

My courtyard is a rectangle of perhaps 60 square meters. Low-slung apartment buildings on every side. Windows looking in. Four small olive trees in clay pots, though not producing olives. Two water taps, one of them with a hose attached, yes! And six or seven garbage cans in the standardized French format (here they’re called poubelles, and we use them for general waste but also for recycling paper and glass). I’ve lived in this building for 20 years, and I’ve entered and exited the courtyard thousands and thousands of times, each passage imprinting a little something in my memory, physical and emotional. I played concerts here during the pandemic confinement: short performances of my own music, for an audience of a few neighbors including two wonderful little kids.

I put two of the cleaner recycling garbage cans side by side and covered them with an old bedsheet. And this became a stable surface on which I could lay my sketchbook.

Neighbors come and go. There’s a subtle soundscape, mostly faint and distant: airplanes, city traffic, doors opening and closing, roadworks. The soundscape is caressing and agreeable: the city is alive, the buildings are alive, the neighbors are alive. Once I knew everything and everyone was alive, I started the physical, oh the very physical process of splotching and splecking. Brush into ink pot, brush onto page, gesture, movement: this is a drawing, this is art. It’s a dance, it’s Tai Chi, it’s air guitar, it’s shadow boxing, it’s squatting like a little child digging a hole. After I draw, I pull the page off the sketchbook and I lay it on the ground to dry. A work session might encompass 25 drawings, 25 dances.

Art is life is paradox. Nobody can define art, and nobody can encapsulate life. How hard am I thinking when I splotch a sheet of paper? It’s paradoxical, because my goal is and isn’t and isn’t and is to make art. My goal is discovery and pleasure. My goal is joy and adoration. My goal is to be barefoot in summer. My goal is to move as if not thinking, and yet my accumulated thoughts of 64 years are inevitably present when I move as if not thinking. I make gestural decisions. I test angles of contact. There’s speed, rhythm, and choreography. I’m clear and vague, I’m determined and flexible, I know a lot and I know very little: it’s all true. To the casual observer, it only takes me three seconds to do any one of my drawings. But that’s misleading. Each drawing takes me 64 years and three seconds.

The creative process is like a swimming pool or a pond or the ocean. I’m inside it; I’m enveloped by it, bathed by it. I float and I swim. The current takes me somewhere, and I follow along. Or, like a dolphin at play, I take the initiative and I jump out of the water and fall back into it again. The main thing, though, is to be in the water, totally; and not separate from it.

Last year I went to hear a famous violinist give a performance of classical music at one of the main Paris concert halls. Once he started playing, I quickly knew that I’d sit there waiting for the first half of the concert to be over, passing the time in frustration and resentment until I could rush back home during the intermission. The fellow wasn’t immersed in the totality; his playing was smooth and very, very professional. But . . . no. He wasn’t “total,” and the experience of watching him wasn’t “total-inducing.” Mine is a subjective perception, needlessly harsh, difficult to explain and to justify. Next time we meet, you and I will share subjective perceptions and harsh judgments, and we’ll do our best to justify them. Or maybe not. Justification is overrated.

We go to the movies and become irritated at something with high production values but no immersion in the creative totality. We start reading a book and sometimes we want to throw it out of the window, or we wish harm upon the writer, famous and accomplished as he and she may be. A painting can sell for millions of dollars and yet be creatively worthless. A gleaming new building goes up in a nice neighborhood, and we take one look at it and we see catastrophic waste, an urban-planning disaster, a moral failure. And we do our best not to dynamite the building.

Territory, materials, motivation, joy, pleasure, stories, paradoxes, symbols, metaphors. Adoration.

The other day I heard someone say, “Art is all about expression.” I didn’t dynamite the building, but I strongly disagreed! Mentally, in silence! “Art is all about connection,” I blasted telepathically.

“Oh, yeah? Connection to what?”

“Let’s go to the Place des Vosges. A little kid is digging a hole there.”

©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

The Tragicomedy

The tragicomedy of too much and not enough.

  1. Too much thinking, and you’ll slice your finger instead of the tomato. Not enough thinking, and you’ll slice your other finger instead of the tomato. In the push-and-pull of thinking and not thinking you shall slice the tomato.

  2. Too much wanting, and you’ll get in the way of what you want. Not enough wanting, and you’ll stay in bed all day, every day. It’ll get moldy. I mean, you will get moldy. In Bhutanese, happiness is called “Want-no-want.”

  3. Too much ego, and you’re an insufferable megalomaniac. Not enough ego, and you’re some sort of overripe banana. A fruit fly has more personality than you.

  4. Too much time, and you become dispersed and lazy. Not enough time, and you become agitated or paralyzed. The exact amount of time is also known as “now.”

  5. Too much technique, and you become a machine operated by AI. Not enough technique, and you become a banana operated by a fruit fly without a pilot’s license. By the way, defining “technique” isn’t easy.

  6. Too much sharing, and you’re an exhibitionist. It’s against the law. Not enough sharing, and you’re a hermit in a cave full of fruit flies. It should be against the law.

  7. Too much light, and you’re blinded. Not enough light, and you don’t see a thing. This also applies to you as a person: show light and dark, and you’ll be seen as being completely human.

©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

I can't, I can!

Your ability to do something is closely connected with your willingness to do it. Very often, when people say “I can’t do that” they really mean “I’m not willing to do that.” I think it’s useful to see or perceive the distinction between two types of “I can’t,” and their corollary, the two types of “I can.”

I apologize for using a relatively complicated word this early in the post. Corollary is “an idea that naturally flows from a different idea, maybe because of a parallel linkage, let’s say.” It also means “Pedro, why do you keep inflating your linguistic balloon? Go TikTok yourself!”

I apologize for having apologized.

Back in my native land, Take-off-your-bra-bra-zil, I had English classes in secondary school and in high school. How well do you learn a language if you don’t immerse yourself fully in the learning of it? When I was 19, I landed in the US for my university studies and found out the bitter truth. I understood little and spoke even less. Listening to my colleagues and not understanding them, I thought that the word “stuff” (which I wasn’t familiar with) was probably a swear word. “You’ll sink or swim,” I remember a friendly colleague telling me during Orientation Week, the first week of the first semester of the first year of my kicking-and-screaming attempt to grow up. Sink or swim? What is that supposed to mean??????

Growing up remains to be tackled, but at least I swam and learned English: “Me speak English goody, sehr sehr gut!” Later on I learned French, which I speak about as well as I speak English. Now I’m learning Spanish, and getting comfortable with it. Here’s an example: “Buenos días, señor.”

There is a vast number of languages that I don’t speak, including many about which I know literally nothing. I can’t speak Khowar, Maiya, or Komi, and I don’t even know where they are spoken. I plucked them from an Internet list of languages in danger of extinction.

But here’s the thing: I’m willing to make a fool of myself and pretend to speak Khowar. I’ll make funny sounds and faces. Gestures, postures, emotions. I’ll start crying, then I’ll do jumping jacks while singing “Ô Khowar Land of Purple Mangoes,” the national anthem. It’s all phony and it has nothing to do with Khowar, but I say “yes” to playacting and hallucinating, to suspending my discernment and my judgment, to lowering or even extinguishing my standards. Yes, I can speak Khowar!

Then I’ll go on YouTube and see what Khowar actually sounds like. I’ll find some wonderful clips right away, and I’ll regret having made jokes about a foreign culture, even though I used the word “Khowar” as nothing but a trigger for improvisation. The trigger could have been “Flemish,” or “Appalachian,” or “Brasiloser” (which I speak pretty well, actually). (I had some Brasiloser ancestors.) (They slipped coming out of the shower, fell, broke their necks, and died.) (Together.) (Brasiloser family life is . . . you know . . . very intimate.)

Let’s lay out a quaternity: two groups of two elements each, arranged like a cross or like the four cardinal points. The elements within a group are closely related, similar to Brasiloser cousins. The two groups are in some sort of dynamic pull, interacting with each other. Structured in this manner, a quaternity delineates a territory in which you find out who you are. What’s your relationship with “I can” and “I can’t”? What’s your relationship with “I say yes” and “I say no"? These relationships interact in a lot of complex ways, and they determine many things in your life. Many things, most things, maybe everything in your life.

I really, really, really can’t speak Khowar and probably never will. In some situations today, I feel nervous about speaking Spanish, because—well, I have bouts of self-conscious standards. Perfectionist worrying about other people. Comfort zone issues. Temporary shyness. Hypoglycemia. I Have My Reasons Syndrome. ¡Tarado de mentecato de badulaque de babieca de bodoque de barbeta! (This is “Pedro” in Spanish.) (I looked it up.)

Can I or can I not speak Spanish? Precisely.

“I can and I can’t,” “I say yes and I say no” are intertwined in the realm of identity, where reason and unreason take a shower together and slip on the soapy surface, sometimes breaking their necks and sometimes aguamoosing.

Translation, please! In life, few things are straightforward. Ultimately, it’s quite heroic to dwell in the demanding quaternity of “I can and I can’t,” having to make endless “I say yes or I say no” decisions that affect you and everyone else around you. In Brasiloser, “life” is pronounced “soapy can-can’t cha-cha-cha.” It’s the most dangerous and the most exhilarating of all dances.

The passage

Our lives are made of our deeply held feelings about what we can or can’t do. Let’s riff on it.

  1. “I can’t perform brain surgery. I mean, really!” I can’t either. The list of things we literally can’t do is extremely long. And that’s okay! The brain surgeon can’t whistle, but we can!

  2. “I can’t fly a plane, of course. I’ve had no training whatsoever.” Sure. But from time to time we read in the news that a passenger with no training was able to land a plane safely, with help from the control tower, after the pilot passed out. Some things we really totally can’t do; others we might become able to do in special circumstances. We don’t know the true limits of our talents and capabilities.

  3. “I can’t draw, never could. Never, never, never.” You might feel certain of that, until the day you actually hold a pencil in your tender fingers and use it to caress a sheet of paper with. “Whaaaat? I can draw?” Some of our certainties are lies that we tell ourselves, and the lies are often supported by an elaborate intellectual and emotional scaffolding. Demolish the scaffolding, dissolve the lie, deny the I can’t!

  4. “I can’t speak, I have no voice.” But I just heard you say, out loud, “I can’t speak, I have no voice!” I think what you mean is, “I’m uncomfortable speaking in public and I don’t enjoy the sensations of my own breath and my own vocal cords.” The subconscious listens to what you say, and takes your statements as commands. If you say “I can’t speak,” the subconscious will obey your command and prevent you from speaking. Instead, say “I want to be more comfortable. Where do I start?” You’ll receive a sign, most likely!

  5. “I can’t wear that shirt.” What will happen, exactly, if you put the shirt on and get out of the house? Will you cause a car crash? Will lightening strike you? Likes and dislikes evolve toward can’s and can’t’s, to coin an expression. I too dislike many types of clothing. And I wouldn’t want to cause a car crash. Recently I’ve started wearing patterned shirts, after many years of wearing nothing but solids. Clothing is part of our identity. I’m glad I’m opening up.

  6. “I can’t resign from my horrible job, where a monstrous boss and a gang of toxic co-workers make my life miserable.” Jobs are important. Or, to put it more broadly, having or earning enough money to survive is important. But suppose you quit the job and sell the house and move to a small rental studio on the edge of downtown, and you get enough money from the house sale to not worry about rent for three years. Then you get a part-time job at a bakery within walking distance of your rental studio and, hey, I’m poor and I’m absolutely ecstatic! It’s not easy to undergo revolutionary change. A monkish lifestyle isn’t for everyone. Strangely, living without strife isn’t for everyone either.

  7. “I can’t be happy. My mother would be terribly hurt if I was happier than her, more dynamic, more fulfilled.” Ah, revolutionary change again! It takes a lot of inner work to get to the point where your wellbeing is the most important thing in your life, the thing that you nourish constantly, THE thing. Parental, familiar, and societal expectations are a big source of I can’t. The passage from I can’t to I can is, symbolically, a departure from the family and the society that impose its restrictions on you. Separation anxiety is guaranteed.

We are all in the grip of I can’t, in some way or another, or in many ways. I’m no exception. My anecdotes don’t mean that I go about my day singing “I can, I can, I can!” I’m just acknowledging a big phenomenon (which affects every human being without exception), systematizing it to some degree, and telling some jokes to see if you and I manage to defeat some of these handicapping I can’t’s.

“Believe you can and you're halfway there.” — Theodore Roosevelt

Nobody understands me

Warning: The author washes his hands. It’s not his fault. It’s the blog post who doesn’t know his elbow from his knee.

Let’s honor Aristotle and start in media res. (In his Poetics, Aristotle advised storytellers to start their tale in the middle of the third round, where you’re bleeding from a cut above your left eye and your opponent is already claiming victory. If only he knew!)

A book can be a labyrinth. Even a single paragraph: you get in, and you can’t get out. Perhaps you’re distracted, not reading closely; or perhaps the paragraph is truly confusing in and of itself. Covering too many subjects at the same time, long sentences, foreign concepts poorly translated into the language you’re reading right now. Or a fancy word used correctly, but you don’t know the word and it trips you up. The writer may be attempting to share an insight about your view of the world, your particular mental operating system, and he calls it your Weltanschauung. Yes, it’s used in English, it’s in the dictionary! Webster’s, I swear! Look it up! And try to pronounce it before you press the little button that pronounces it for you.

A blog post can be like a labyrinth, and then you can say it’s “labyrinthine.” Yes, it’s a word, I swear! Okay, Pedro, no need to swear. We get it.

It’s useful to know the word “labyrinthine,” because it saves you from some horrendous synonyms, like “daedal” or “involute.” I had never heard of those two words until I started researching this post.

A fictional world in literature or cinema is often labyrinthine. You enter it and you get lost. Let’s take William Faulkner, for instance, and the unpronounceable county he invented—

No, wait! Let’s not take Faulkner. Instead, let’s backtrack. I’ve decided that “daedal” is a fine word after al; I’ve learned more about it since I first mentioned it. It refers to Daedalus, the father of Icarus and the builder of the Cretan labyrinth that housed the minotaur.

I don’t know much about Faulkner, because whenever I’ve tried to read one of his novels in the past I got totally lost after less than a page. But this proves, proves! that his work is like a labyrinth. Music, cinema, literature, philosophy, the rules of baseball, theology, dating, and IKEA instructions are exactly alike, because they all tend toward the daedal. Dating is worse than theology, but IKEA is worse than dating. I’m grateful that I’m married, and to a woman who enjoys following IKEA instructions.

Suppose that you’re in great pain and you rush yourself to an emergency room at a hospital where everyone is super-busy and super-stressed, besides being badly paid, poorly trained, drunk, and sadistic. Suppose you say, “My knee! For the love of God, inject my knee with cortisone! More, more, more!” And suppose you have long thought that the knee is “the elbow of the leg,” and—and in comes the needle, and the cortisone destroys your healthy knee, because you really meant the inflamed elbow. Not that other elbow down there, this one up here! You know, the knee of my arm, not the elbow of my leg!

The above paragraph is purely fictional. Never in American hospitals do doctors and nurses make mistakes, never ever! Except in Yoknapatawpha County.

But my point, supposing that I have a point, is that vocabulary is quite important. Don’t say “knee” when you mean “elbow.” And don’t say “labyrinth” when you mean “maze.”

Back when Daedalus was designing a complicated habitation for a half-man, half-bull monster, that type of building was called a labyrinth—by some people, anyway. Sooner or later, other people started saying that a labyrinth has only one entry point and one path toward its center. The path may be twisty and scary, if you wish; but it’s one path and one path only, plus it’s not really meant to confuse you but rather to get you to meditate about the meaning of life and, ultimately, to shift your Weltanschauung. A maze, however, has many entry points and many paths, including some that result in dead-ends, blind alleys, and cul-de-sacs (which really should be called culs-de-sac, but not souls-de-quack). Technically, the labyrinth is unicursal, the maze is multicursal. And the maze is, in fact, designed to confuse you—unlike this blog post, which is labyrinthine (and therefore trying to help you shift your you-know-what).

You hear what I’m saying? Since I was a newborn I’ve been using the word labyrinth, but apparently I was referring to what some other newborns call a maze.

Cortisone, please! And lots of it!

©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

PS Some languages don’t have separate words for labyrinth and maze. ¡Maldito laberinto que no me deja dormir!

On the art of collaboration

My piano method, an ambitious undertaking that I’ve been working on for five years, received its final approval from my editor and is now under production. We don’t have a publication date yet, but let’s invent it: May 31, 2023.

Writing, revising, editing, producing, and publishing are a collaborative endeavor. My piano method, for instance, involves an acquiring editor, multiple anonymous readers who determine whether or not the method should be published, a project manager, a copy editor, a layout designer, a cover designer, a marketing team, and others still. I thought I’d share a few observations regarding the ins and outs of teamwork.

  1. You’re human, imperfect, and perfectible. So are your collaborators. It’s a little inhuman for you to expect or demand that your collaborators be perfect.

  2. Keep an invisible Post-it foremost in your mind, listing some of the flaws and gaps in your professionalism. Not replying quickly to important emails; misplacing files or documents; writing confusing paragraphs; neglecting duties and tasks. These are just some examples in the abstract. The idea isn’t for you to beat yourself up with these flaws, only to remember that you’re imperfect and perfectible, like all humans.

  3. It’s absolutely incredible that other people are invested in your project and putting lots of time and thought into it. Wake up in wonderment and gratitude, and go to sleep in gratitude and wonderment.

  4. Somebody you’ve never met and might never meet goes home at the end of the work day and says to her partner, “This guy has some interesting ideas. His method is kinda complicated, but I’m enjoying the challenges of laying it out. I think it’s going to be good.” It’s possible, right?

  5. Over the decades, my editors at Oxford University Press saved my a** on several occasions. One day about 20 years ago they rejected a project proposal outright. And you know what? The project wasn’t ready, and I wasn’t ready. I took ten years to re-think and re-write the project, which was then accepted and published. A collaborator says “No, Pedro!” and it turns out to be a very positive thing.

  6. Your collaborators have skills that you don’t have, life experiences that you don’t have, insights that you don’t have. In my opinion, it’s very difficult for an individual to truly assess and appreciate the totality of another individual. It’s good to accept that you don’t know exactly what the other person is really like. Then you won’t rush to judgment.

  7. Sometimes it all works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But one thing is for sure: without collaborators, there is no project.

Rodin is alive!

Think. Don’t think. Pay attention to other people. Ignore other people. Your goals determine your behavior. Your behavior impedes the achievement of your goals. Plan. Improvise. The artist is dead. The artist is immortal.

On a recent Sunday afternoon I visited the Rodin Museum in central Paris. My brother-in-law and his family were in town, and we all went there, together with my wife Alexis. While at the Museum I had an interesting experience. Or, to put it more precisely, I experienced yet again the twisty incomprehensible marvelousness of life.

I brought a fresh sketchpad with me, a spiral-bound, A5-sized little thing with 50 blank sheets, perfectly ordinary. (There’s nothing ordinary about sketching, nor about the entire chain of people and events that causes a friendly sketchbook to be in my hands, to be “mine.” Perfectly extraordinary!) I thought I’d draw one sketch per sheet for the whole pad, a total of 50 sketches produced during this one museum visit.

I probably spent about 75 minutes going from gallery to gallery, then on to the beautiful gardens in the back of the museum. Here’s the method: I’d park myself in front of a sculpture and start sketching immediately. I never looked at a label telling me who made the sculpture and who or what it depicted. Most things were by Rodin, I assume; but it’s possible that some pieces were made by a friend, an enemy, a lover, a teacher, a student, or someone linked to Rodin in some way. On this visit, it didn’t matter in the least. What mattered was my goal—50 sketches—and my process, my choices, my decisions, my behavior, my sketchpad (“mine!”), my pencils, my eyes, my brain, my heart, my history, my past, my present, my future, with an emphasis on my then-present, now-past. I was more important than Rodin, and still am! Forever and ever! And I’m not an egomaniac, now or ever! I’m not saying I’m a better artist than Rodin, I’m only saying that “I” was looking at Rodin’s work, and “I” had a unique perspective and perception—and so did everyone else at the Museum. It’d be impossible for me to look at a sculpture with Rodin’s eyes, or with my wife’s or my niece’s, or a tourist’s. My eyes, and my eyes only. “I am mine.”

I’d choose a sculpture, deciding on which one after a few seconds’ thought. It wasn’t important. Any sculpture would do. I’d park myself in front of the sculpture or next to it, to its side, maybe behind it. It wasn’t important. And I’d sketch for ten seconds, twenty, forty-five seconds. Not important. I’d look without thinking much, and I’d scribble on the sketchpad without thinking much, and I’d capture or try to capture the gist of the sculpture (the gist according to my eyes, past, present, and future), or just have some subjective little head trip, and my hands would go zapty zapty, and I was done! I’d quickly turn the page and go park myself next to another sculpture, zapty zapty done!

I did it 50 times, about 35 or 38 of them inside the museum and the rest around the garden out back. It means I actually achieved the goal I gave myself, oh how disciplined, oh how low-standards, oh how fun.

Some museum goers don’t really look at anything. They amble through the premises, in boredom and impatience, just ticking off the visit on an informal list of things-to-do, places-to-see. Others are more attentive. It’s lovely to see a young parent with a very young child, the child amazed at some strange head or face or object, the parent keeping the child company or perhaps gently helping the child see the strange head. But the main thing is that I’d notice that some people wanted to look at the very sculpture I was sketching, and I’d interrupt my work and let them take my place, and they’d see or not see for a few seconds and move on, and I’d go back to my sketching position and finish my work. I ignored people, and I paid attention to people, and I did both at the same time. It’s a dynamic state of fluid attention, which in my informal neuroscience (I know nothing about the actual science of neuroscience) encourages the flow of love-everyone-dopamine. I loved the little kids looking at the strange heads, I loved the young parents, I loved the bored tourists, I loved Rodin, I loved the blobs that Rodin sculpted, and I loved my sketches, and I loved myself, and in my estimation I’m more important than Rodin, who’s dead and who’s immortal.

I’m almost one-hundred-percent sure that at least one person took a photo or a video of me sketching some blobby blob. And if I’m right, then it’s likely that social media now has a public register of an overweight middle-aged bald short-sighted amateur sketch artist doing a sloppy sketch of a blob in the Rodin Museum. Hey, do you think I interrupted my process to tell the tourist not to video me in my private moment? Hell, no. My process involved the tourist, my process required the tourist to register my process. Unconditional love is “involving.” Plus, my process wasn’t private. I wore my process like I wear a guy-bikini (you know, “show what you’ve got”) (and “it doesn’t have to be pretty”) (and a guy in a guy-bikini “isn’t pretty”) (and the guy-bikini and the mankini aren’t the same “thing”).

At the garden I noticed a young woman (I think she was 17 or so) standing near me, seemingly watching me sketch. And I swear she was smiling. And I swear on Rodin’s grave, may he rest in peace, I swear that the smiling young woman moved on with me when I went to the next sculpture in the garden, and she stood not far from me, slightly behind me, most likely watching how my head trip about Rodin was becoming a few pencil lines on a cheap little sketchpad. “I had a follower.”

But that isn’t important either.

Life is a labyrinth of paradoxes. The ordinary is extraordinary. The dead are immortal. Other people aren’t important, although you love them unconditionally. I think, therefore I am; I don’t think, therefore I sketch. I’m a speck of nothing, and I’m the center of the Universe, which according to certain theories is expanding at an alarming rate. Billions of years ago there was a bang, quite big! One thing led to another, and now I look good in a guy-bikini.

 ©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

First Times

We all know the power of the first time: the first memory, the first kiss, the first trip in an airplane, the first public performance, the first death in the family . . . Every day we do many things for the first time, although it’s not every day that we notice or cherish the first-timeness of the things we’re doing for the first time.

This is the first time I have used the expression “first-timeness,” which of course Goethe plagiarized from me when he wrote Erstezeitlichkeit und die Fünf Bananen in 1804.

Fünf Bananen

But I diverge (Bananen). Today I’d like to talk about some of the first-time things that jostle your awareness and mark you forever and ever, the things that open up your mind, which means the things that proved to you that your mind was closed and you didn’t know it.

In my youth I took lessons in the Alexander Technique with a famous teacher, a significant player in the history and traditions of the profession. Innocently I had imagined, assumed, and determined that the famous and beloved teacher was necessarily a competent expert. Right? Fame, tradition, history, Bananen, you name it. One day she saw me go into a squat to pick up my shoes, and she stopped me cold in mid-flight. “Never do that,” she said sternly. “It’s wrong.” And, pling ka-boom cha-cha-cha! I suddenly understood that she was literal-minded, dogmatic, and judgmental, and I suddenly understood that I had been rather silly in my assumptions. This happened more than 35 years ago, but the experience of the ka-boom has stayed with me, as if I had undergone a secret ritual initiating me into belated incipient adulthood. Believe it or not, Goethe calls it “Verspätet einsetzendes Erwachsensein,” and several characters in his Faust / Eine Tragödie undergo similar rites of passage.

The moral of the story? Make no assumptions. Among the many assumptions you’re better off NOT making, don’t assume that so-and-so is like this-and-that (or, as Sigmund Freud said on the centenary of Goethe’s death, “So-und-so ist wie dies und das.”)

For several decades I lived with the certainty that I had no talent for drawing. I could prove it, absolutely! All I had to do was to draw a crappy stick figure and say, Look! I cannot draw! Roughly 15 years ago, circumstances led me to decide to do one little drawing every night before going to bed. I started by copying photos of family members. The third night, my little drawing of my nephew as a baby came out . . . well . . . kinda super-excellent. I had to accept that I had long lied to myself, and that I had believed the lie with all my heart. The baby of hard truth now stared me in the face: I can draw. I think this was the first very substantial experience of catching myself in the act of telling-a-lie-to-myself-about-myself, which Freud called “Ego Schmego Hasta la Vista Amigo.”

The immoral of the story? If you need to tell a lie, don’t tell it to yourself about yourself! Tell it to Freud about Goethe! Or the other way around! “Von links nach rechts, von rechts nach links!”

I used to think of myself as an intellectual. Some 28 years ago, a participant in one of my workshops told me, “Pedro, you’re the archetypical intuitive.” I resented her, because—hey, intellectuals rank higher than intuitives in the DM-ID: A Clinical Guide for Diagnosis of Mental Disorders in Persons With Intellectual Disability. A real book, I swear! You can buy it on amazon.fr for 1500 euros, and I’m not making this up! It took me many years to embrace the clinical fact that intuition was my primary mode of functioning. But my point is that there was a first time when I heard the news, a shocking first time, an upsetting first time. I wish I could send a valentine to the girl who brought it to my attention, although of course I don’t remember her name, her face, or her Schweinshaxe.

And the amoral of the story? Listen to the herald bringing you good news, shocking or upsetting as the news may be. But don’t listen to what Goethe says about Freud,* because you risk going quite kuku in der Keke.

*”Du bist Bananen.”

©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

Seven Strategies

What do the seven musketeers and the four dwarves have in common? Rhetorical question. No need to answer.

Seriously, we tend to create groups of people, things, and ideas, and the number of elements in the group plays a rule in how we react to the group. The Three Musketeers is the tale that d’Artagnan tells about meeting Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, “the three inseparables.” The Musketeers of legend, then, start as three plus one until they become four, organically.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves are similarly ambiguous: seven plus one, which “is a kind of eight, without being exactly eight.” If we thought of them as eight, rather than seven plus one, their tale would be perverted, immoral, and dirty. Against the law.

Over the years and decades, these specific groupings have made a deep impression in our brains. It’s quite likely that our brains “wanted to be impressed.” Numerical organization makes brains happy. And our brains shall henceforth rebel against seven musketeers and four dwarves. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong.

The Eleven Commandments? No, no, no.

The Thirteen Apostles? No, no, no!

The Hundred and Four Dalmatians? Nooooooooooo!

The Five Cardinal Points? You’re making me dizzy.

But this is only an introduction to the real subject of this blog post. I’ve been very busy with projects, deadlines, tasks, obligations, happenings, duties, pleasures, also tasks and deadlines, plus a whole bunch of projects. Paperwork, admin, correspondence. Shopping, cooking, cleaning. Friendly duties urgently performed for loving friends. Have I mentioned tasks and deadlines?

Thankfully, I have Seven Strategies for S-Dissipating Stress. (I couldn’t find a synonym for “dissipating” starting with “s,” except maybe “squandering.”) Be warned: my strategies work!

1. The worst-case scenario. Most of the time, most of us are pretty much safe from war, plague, earthquakes, and really terrible deadly situations. When it comes to the stresses of daily life and our too-many tasks and obligations, it’s useful to imagine “the worst-case scenario.” I won’t finish the project on time. Or I’ll never finish the project. Or I’ll give up on the project. But I’ll come out of it alive and well. It’s very, very, very reassuring to know that in most situations you’ll come out alive and well.

2. Evacuate. This means, create a space (or void or vacuum, e-vacu-ate) inside yourself, by “getting rid of stuff,”mostly those spiky psychic objects called emotions. You can make lists of the tarantulas eating you up inside and “see them on paper” rather than “feel them in your brain.” The brain becomes clearer when you put stuff down in writing. Or put it down “in speaking.” Talk to people, be they amateurs (spouses, mothers-in-law, passers-by) or professionals (psychotherapists, lawyers, hit men). This too can clear the mind and cause your stress to go either up or down, depending.

3. Rhythm is everything. The late Yogi Berra was a baseball player with a stellar career and the reputation for saying wonderfully paradoxical, Zen-like statements that probably came out of his mouth very different from how they were cooked in his mind. Here’s a famous thing that Yogi Berra definitely never said: “Balls fly like time.”

4. Lower your standards. Rumor has it that a perfect omelet was served to Mademoiselle Angélique Dupont at lunchtime on October 17, 1952, at a now-defunct bistrot in Dijon. The one perfect thing in the whole of history! (And it’s only a rumor.) Approximation, compromise, and an acceptable so-so result for various tasks of yours are all much better than the frantic search for something that doesn’t exist, the bugaboo called perfection. For instance, let your blog post be incoherent! In the worst-case scenario, you’ll lose all your subscribers!

5. Be human, to the extent that you can. Here’s the thing about perfection: To be perfect means to have all qualities, otherwise you’re “incomplete, therefore imperfect.” That means that to be perfect means to be lazy, sloppy, inattentive, repetitive, inattentive, repetitive, sloppy, and lazy SOME OF THE TIME. Using CAPITALS in writing is often considered rude, like you’re shouting. And NO HUMAN BEING EVER SHOUTS! PEDRO, I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!

6. Forgive yourself, then give yourself a medal.

7. Work extremely hard non-stop. Don’t take breaks or naps. Get no assistance from anyone, ever. Don’t read the instruction manual and don’t watch helpful videos on YouTube. Do the work of three people all by yourself. Age as fast as you can, and die young. Rumor has it that death solves many problems. As Yogi Berra didn’t say, “Dead men don’t sweat.”

 ©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

Backstage

Have you visited a supermarket on the day and time when the workers are restocking the shelves? Have you walked by a construction site and inhaled the deep cold smell of freshly poured concrete? Have you entered a building through the service door in the parking garage, and have you gotten lost in a maze of corridors trying to get to an urgent appointment inside the building?

I consider all these experiences to be similar. They give you a connection with the backstage, that is, with the workings of a place, organization, or city. When you attend a play, you see it all “up front” as you sit in the audience and watch the action happening on stage. But behind the scenery there are machines, tools, stage hands, procedures, practices, schedules, accidents, repairs, and a thousand other things happening out of sight and most often out of hearing.

Backstage allows the front stage to happen. Workers stocking shelves allow the supermarket to function and to provide you with the goods and services that you need. Whole cities have their backstage of subterranean passages, power stations, sewage lines, tunnels, and cables, allowing you to live safely and comfortably.

I went to Milan recently, to teach two seminars at a guitar festival. I extended my visit by a couple of days so that I could spend some time exploring the magnificent city. One of my extra days fell on a Monday. All the museums were closed. Tourist sites were as if abandoned. I went here and there in the city center, often finding myself completely alone in a beautiful winding street with buildings from three centuries ago. On that lonely Monday, the buildings sweetly whispered their secret stories into my ears. I felt that I was backstage in Milan, exploring the city’s this-is-how-it-works rather than its spectacle. I can’t tell you how happy I was.

In the big cities that I love to visit there are alleyways between buildings with service entrances, garbage disposal, the feeling of mystery and secret, also of danger. This is the backstage of apartment houses, offices, restaurants, shops of all sorts. At night, the backstage is gloriously cinematic. The imagination flies . . . love trysts, drug deals, murders. And rats, although these are much too real. Let’s say that “night is the backstage of day.”

I visit my local farmer’s market twice a week. I like going early in the morning, around 8 AM. In winter it’s dark, and depending on my timing I get to watch the changing light as the sun slowly rises. Some of the stands haven’t finished setting up when I arrive. I see the men and women drag crates from their vans parked at the curb. I see their putting up strings of lights on the awnings above their stands. Boxes of ice with fresh fish, the fish not yet arrayed prettily on the stands. I’m often a stand’s first customer of the day. Twice a week I’m backstage, witnessing my friends’ work, marveling at their skill and discipline, grateful for their dedication and reliability.

Backstage is richly populated. Museum guards, baristas, gardeners, delivery men and women, technicians, receptionists, school crossing guards, cleaners. I’ve had some wonderful chats in São Paulo, Paris, Glasgow, and points in between. The museum guard at the Musée Guimet of Asian Arts whose face hinted at the Buddha, the waiter on a cigarette break outside a restaurant, the cheerful crossing guard who kept something of the child within him, the gardener at the Place des Vosges with the poise and balance of a Tai Chi master. Sometimes the backstage hand is a displaced immigrant struggling between hope and fear, and his smile is heartbreaking to see.

At parties, conferences, meetings, baptisms and weddings I tend to become antsy. Sooner or later I feel compelled to get out of the main venue and explore the surroundings by myself. And I often witness the most marvelous happenings and encounters, in which the interplay between intimacy and formality is different from what we see “in public.”

A piano has a backstage, as does a cello, a guitar, any piece of furniture. “Backstage machinery has backstage machinery.”

We don’t have to stretch the metaphor too far before we understand that each of us has his or her own backstage, the workshop of the mind, the lifts and ramps for delivery, our innermost cleaning closet.

And an actual stage has an actual backstage, believe it or not. Several years ago, my wife Alexis and I were treated to a private tour of the backstage area of the Paris Opera at Bastille. Clothes making, wig making, shoes of all types and sizes; everything crazy and incredible, which is what opera is about. Huge spaces like hangars, industrial machinery, if you’re afraid of heights stay home.

My work as a teacher and coach often takes place backstage. In 2019 I taught an in-depth seminar for the actors of the Comedia Nacional, the main theater in Uruguay’s capital Montevideo. Deep inside, hidden from passersby or prying eyes, we the pros worked together for three days, playing games and learning from one another. During that visit I actually “went to the theater” and watched my colleagues delight the public with their storytelling. And for me to have been part of their preparation backstage . . . wow. Unbelievable.

There’s something exciting and terrifying about the corridors behind the stage, the stairs, the dust, the muffled sounds of your own steps. Because sooner or later you’ll have to pass from the back to the front, and you’ll find yourself naked on stage, in front of an audience. Then you’ll know whether or not you did your backstage job of cleaning up, structuring, and fashioning your music for the benefit of the men and women who came to see you perform.

©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

Repeat after me!

Life is, oh so repetitive. How many breaths do we really take every day? Thousands. How many steps do we take? How many movements of jaw and tongue as we speak, argue, and exclaim? Thousands, thousands, thousands. Start thinking about it, and you’ll quickly conclude that it’s not possible to be alive if you don’t agree to a repetitive practice.

If you do any one thing twice, that counts as a repetition. Two or two thousand or two million, it’s all repetition. But two thousand times, with your mind focused on the action: wow. That is repetition! “To strive after, to attack, to rush, to fly!”

Adapted from etymonline.com.

To do a thing many times: normal, banal, inevitable. To pay attention to a thing as you repeat it thousands of times: extraordinary. Attention is the mother of meaning. Your repetitive breath becomes meaningful when you pay attention to it. This isn’t free of risks, as you might become terribly self-conscious about ribs, throat, diaphragm, and—and oxygen. You’ll hyperventilate and pass out, guaranteed. Attention is the mother of dyspnea, hyperpnea, and oligopnea.

But I digress. Something doesn’t truly exist until you pay attention to it. And something truly exists when you pay attention to it. The something may be a fictional character, an abstract idea, or a voice in your head. It exists by occupying your psychic territory, and if you remain attentive to it over time, it’ll develop and grow. The monster becomes extremely strong if you think about him again-and-again-and-again. It doesn’t matter if the monster was born in the Maternity of Your Santa Cabeza. It’s a giant.

Repetitive practice creates monsters, for sure. But it also creates marvels.

You look at the face of your own child tens of thousands of times. You see the growing child differently from moment to moment, from year to year. The child is always changing, and so are you. On occasion, or often, or very often, you look without seeing. You may be “looking at your feelings” rather than “looking at the child.” But, all counted, you look at your child’s face for the equivalent of two full years, spread out over eight decades. Thirty thousand psychic snapshots, a repeated practice of unfathomable import (or, as Carl Jung used to say, “ein hellava Ting zu Du.”).

The average museum goer looks at a work of art for less than thirty seconds before moving on. How much information do you gather about something in thirty seconds flat, as opposed to two years spread out over eight decades? Look at the painting for longer; look at it more often; return to the museum or gallery and look at it in the morning and in the afternoon, before you eat and after you eat. The painting doesn’t behave the same when you’re hypoglycemic and when you’re over-caffeinated.

Go back, look again, go back, look again,

look for a while longer, look and stay looking.

An art gallery near my home had a show of paintings by Sean Scully, the great Irish-American artist. I visited it six times, staying between 25 and 40 minutes each time. There were about 18 paintings in the show. Let’s say three hours of visits all counted, 18 paintings, ten minutes per painting. “I looked Sean Scully in the eye. We didn’t blink.”

You don’t have to go to actual museums. You can look at any one thing, one beautiful thing in your home, again and again many times: a book, a rug, a piece of carpentry, the window giving out onto the garden. Or a wall of street art in your neighborhood.

I’m a big fan of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian poet, essayist, and short-story writer. I’ve been reading the same few short stories again and again—I mean, some of his stories I’ve now read thirty or forty times.

The information digs little pathways in your brain, and starts to influence your life and to change it. Symbolically if not biologically, the repeated information becomes embodied—that is, it becomes part of you. You look at a guy walking down the street, and you see his embodied information, the result of his repeated practice. This principle is easy to assess if you limit the observation to something like athletic activity: you see the guy’s biceps, and they bulge, do they ever. But the principle is operative across all fields of existence. The intellectual’s repetitive think-hard practice bulges, too! Does it ever!

Exact repetition of a gesture doesn’t happen often. Some aspect of the gesture is repeated, another aspect is varied. But in our system, this still counts as repetition. No two of my two thousand visits to the Place des Vosges were ever exactly alike, and some visits were remarkably different from the average visit. It doesn’t matter; variety is a fine component of repetitive practice.

Repetitive practice isn’t based on “I should do this,” but on “I want to do this.” Pleasure, integration, paradise. Repeat after me:

Pleasure, integration, paradise.

Pleasure, integration, paradise.

Pleasure, integration, paradise.

Pleasure, integration, paradise!

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

The Ten Laws of Preparation

The other day one of my talented and motivated students asked me to help her prepare a presentation. This got me thinking, and I came up with The Ten Laws of Preparation. Notice the definite article: THE Ten Laws. Absolutes are Ridiculous. Let’s go!

1. Everyone is different. No two people will prepare in the exact same manner. What works for me may kill you. Is that what you want? To die? Prepare for it! In your own way!

2. Don’t be an idiot. Generally speaking, people don’t retain much information from presentations. Instead they react to the presenter, to the environment, to the other people in the room. Impressions, feelings, sensations, and emotions; participants “like it” or they “don’t like it.” It means that you can give a successful presentation by being pleasant or entertaining or remarkable in some way—regardless of the materials you present.

3. Okay, let’s suppose that you want to present something meaningful, besides displaying your quirky personality. Then your presentation needs a minimum of structure. The type of structure, its complexity, and its design will vary tremendously from presentation to presentation, according to (1) the personality of the presenter, (2) the materials in question, (3) the circumstances, and (4) Mysterious Magma Flowing Through Your Innards. We’ll talk about structure some other day, but for now let’s state that SOME structure tends to be better than NO structure, and TOO MUCH structure is as problematic as NO structure.

4. Presentation Mechanics: slides, materials, objects, technology. I attended a big conference a couple of years ago. Every presenter but one projected slides on a big screen, sometimes of images only and sometimes text only. You know, the usual power-point thingy, frequently lacking in “power” and often not having a “point.” Many images were low-fidelity reproductions from the Internet. A single presenter, who happened to be a Zen teacher, simply talked to the crowd of about two hundred people. It was quite a contrast: heart, brain, and voice shared directly with the listeners, without the intermediation of images or text. The main thing, though, is to have a notion of why and how you’re going to use technology. If your why and how are good, your technology is good! And remember law #1: people are different. Power Point has friends (some of you) and enemies (some of me).

5. Redundancy (extra materials, short version, long version). Your presentation should be like an accordion, capable of expanding and contracting. I once attended a workshop for which the presenter (the accordion) was contracted, so to speak; she only had about ten minutes of material for a one-hour presentation. After she ran out of things to share (air), she stood there, silent and forlorn (deflated). I took over and continued the presentation for her, improvising a number of fine exercises on the excellent theme that she had proposed. Yes, “I inflated my accordion, uninvited.” But, hey! It was either me or Forlorn Deflation.

6. What if several participants don’t show up? What if the computer cables fail completely? What if the dog ate your homework? In my early adolescence (technically in my puberty, also known as Acne Horribilis), I found myself taking part in a kids’ program on a rinky-dink TV station. On that occasion I was going to play the recorder, after which I was going to play the cello. Cute! In front of the camera, I opened my recorder box. And to my surprise and horror the instrument wasn’t there. It was on my bed, at home, far, far away, out of reach, in Planet Crapyourpants. I quickly closed the empty box and announced, to the camera and to the world (meaning the three or four people watching the show in their homes), “Actually, I think it’d rather play the cello only. It’ll be more interesting.” (Or words to that effect. It has been fifty years since that acne-aggravating event.) It’s better not to assume that everything will go according to plan. Checking things a million times can help, but—no, what really helps is to be adaptable.

7. Psychological Preparation. Feeling good feels better than feeling bad. And the better you feel, the better you present! Beans, beans, the magical fruit! Ahead of your presentation, during it, and afterward, rely on every tool at your disposal to feel good about yourself, and also your materials, your audience, your friends, your colleagues, your family, your neighbors, your pets, your manicurist, and your psychiatrist.

8. Experience is “accumulated preparation,” and preparation is “accumulated experience.” One of my college mentors is a brilliant pianist and musicologist. He’s given thousands of concerts, plus tens of thousands of lessons and seminars and lectures. He was a child prodigy to begin with, and now he’s a professor at Harvard (emeritus). In one of our recent encounters, he told me that it has been many years since he last gave a lecture from notes. Instead, he talks a blue streak in any of three languages according to the needs of the house. He knows his stuff inside out, he’s comfortable with the limelight, he has merited the right to a high opinion of himself, and—well, People Are Very Different One From The Other. But over time, you can kinda relax about preparation and rely on . . . on a high opinion of yourself, maybe. Earn it, though!

9. Trust and faith. The materials, the mechanics, the outfit you wear: important. But having a sense, deep in yourself, that things will work out, that you’ll survive, that people are there for you and not against you, that the History of Humanity Since Time Immemorial is Full of Forgiven and Forgotten Over-Prepared and Under-Prepared Presentations, that the Skies Above Will Grant You Insights That You Didn’t See Coming Until You Found Yourself on Stage . . . “go present, and you’ll receive a present.”

10. “Nine jokes and one insight are much better than nine insights and one insult.” You know who said this, don’t you? Goethe, of course. In “Der Neue Speedy Gonzales” (1833) he wrote that “nueve chistes y una revelación son mucho mejores que nueve revelaciones y un insulto.” ¡Por supuesto!*

*Genau!

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

Three Lifestyles

Grammar is dangerous, and grammar is helpful. To put it differently, grammar determines who you are. You have to watch out for its traps, and also seek its benefits.

A coffee mug is a noun, which we can also call a thing or an objet. It wants to exist as an objective reality; or, rather, we like to believe that the thing or object is, you know, objective. A coffee mug is a thing, unchangeable until you break it.

But love too is grammatically a noun, as are “beauty,” “idea,” “fear,” “performance,” and “confusion.” This is tricky, because you might really start thinking of love as an object or a thing with its hoped-for objective dimension.

A concert is coming up. You need to “give a performance.” Then you put yourself in an object-oriented frame of mind, where the performance—a noun—becomes a thing with an apparent objective reality. This is the “noun frame of mind,” with its own practicalities. It tends to make performers very nervous and frustrated.

How about you put yourself in the “verb frame of mind”? Instead of “giving a performance,” you “perform.” This, too, has its own practicalities.

Become a verb, and you’ll heal yourself from being a noun.

Action happens in time and space. It expands and contracts. It changes, sometimes unpredictably. The thing called “a performance” has measurable parameters: “I want my performance to be like this, and like this, and like that.” The action of performance is less easily measured. “I performed, and—wow. I can’t tell you what happened. In the act of performing I became transformed, and so did the public. Not everyone enjoyed it, but—wow.” Unlike a fixed object, action evolves, so to speak.

Noun: “My love for you is a coffee mug.” Verb: “I love you like flowing steam pressing against tightly packed freshly ground coffee in a De’Longhi Magnifica, no milk, no sugar, thank you. And keep the change.”

It’s not the same love, is it?

It’s a big deal to pass from being noun-oriented to verb-oriented, from thing-oriented to action-oriented, from object-objective oriented to subject-subjective oriented. I’m dying to Google-translate this last sentence into German and credit it to Freud or Goethe, but instead I’ll translate it into Fridge Magnet and credit it to Siddhartha: “Love is an action, not an object.”

Ah, irresistible.

Freud image by Evgeny Parfenov.

Believe it or not, this post isn’t about the difference between object and action, noun and verb, coffee mug and caffeine jolt. Everything so far was just the olives before the tajine (“die Oliven vor der Tajine“), the anesthetics before the surgery (“die Anästhesie vor der Operation“), the cartoon before the feature (“die Micky Maus vor den Sieben Samurai”).

I like reading, studying, and learning. It’s probably the main aspect of my existence, a constant, a defining trait. An example: for the past few years I’ve been learning Spanish, thanks to books, newspapers, films, documentaries, meetings, encounters, and also lessons with a marvelous teacher. Another example: most days I visit Wikipedia and read up on stuff. Some of it is pretty straightforward: biographies of musicians, the rise and fall of the Holy Roman Empire, mating habits of extinct insects. (Liar.) I read about Johannes Brahms, I add information to my knowledge of the great composer, and I check YouTube for works of his that I wasn’t previously familiar with.

And then I try—oh, I try!—reading up on German philosophers. Schopenhauer, for instance. Or Kant or Nietzsche or Kakadu, Graf von Käsespätzle. And by the second paragraph of Kakadu’s page I don’t know what on earth Wikipedia is talking about. However many times I masticate it, the Quietscheentchen Conjecture won’t go down. I spit it out, or as Nietzsche would say, “Ich spucke es aus.”

Another ignominious defeat comes when I tackle quantum mechanics. It doesn’t matter if I approach it in English or in Sanskrit. (1) I don’t understand it. (2) Nobody does! Mathematicians and physicians. Werner Heisenberg. Ernst Schrödinger. Marlene Dietrich. But—and this is what this blog post is about—the fact that we don’t understand the probability fields of quantum mechanics doesn’t have to stop us from embracing it as a life principle.

I went onto the Marvel Fandom website (home of 250,000+ fan wikis). I don’t know Kakadu about Marvel characters and stories, but the website had something helpful to say about the probability field. Abridged:

The probability field is the fifth unifying force in the Grand Unification Theory (along with gravity, electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear forces). As it governs reality, its manipulation allows various super-powered individuals to alter reality on a microscopic or even macroscopic level. The term was first applied to that which mediates between space-time and consciousness by neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles (1903-1997, Nobel Prize 1963). . . . The whole universe is enfolded in everything and each thing is enfolded in the whole; and it is the probability field that controls and connects all things.

Some Marvel characters who have the superpower to manipulate the probability field include Black Cat, Longshot, and Scarlet Witch. And, no, I have no idea who they are.

Let’s pick a score by Johannes Brahms—the “Deutsches Requiem” will do. It’s tempting to consider it as an object, a thing, a well-delineated entity that you can see, touch, and read. But its object-like dimension is secondary to your subjective action of reading it, and also interpreting it in rehearsal and performance. Brahms becomes a verb: “I’m Brahmsizing all week. It feels good.”

According to my newly acquired Marvel wisdom, the “Deutsches Requiem” isn’t an object or an action at all. It’s a probability field. It “mediates between space-time and consciousness,” that is, it offers you a labyrinth of vibrational meaning in which you, Brahms, and the rest of the whole universe become folded-in-one like a lawn chair in a hurricane. Longshot sings “Der Gerechten Seelen sind in Gottes Hand” in G-flat major. Scarlet Witch plays first horn, and Black Cat plays the triangle. The Fridge Magnet says, “Love is an action, not an object.” Marvel says, “Love isn’t an action nor an object. Love is a probability field.” The field is intrinsically uncertain. It looks and behaves differently according to who occupies it. To explore the field is to transform it. You pay attention, and the field lights up and moves. You stop paying attention, and the field dissipates and vanishes. The field is a version of you, and you’re a version of the field.

Love is just an illustration. Everything can be seen as (1) an object, (2) an action, or (3) a probability field. Each of these dimensions comes with its practicalities.

It’s good to be verb-oriented and subject-subjective-oriented. It really is wonderful. But the ultimate psychic transformation lies in going from object to action to probability field. Action implies intention and agency, choosing this path over this other path. The probability field implies infinite complexity and deep connection, all paths walked at the same time, excluding nothing and embracing everything. As Freud once said to Goethe, “Der dumme Brasilianer weiß nicht, wovon er redet, Kakadu!” Translated to Fridge Magnet: “Don’t worry, be happy.”

It’s a superpower.

Read this short blog post if you didn’t understand this long one!

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

How to become perfect

Recently I led a music workshop in Paris—or, more exactly, a workshop on thinking, feeling, doing, sensing, talking, listening, sharing, enjoying, giving, receiving, analyzing, and celebrating, some of it related to making music. And some of it related to life.

Imagine a musician playing for someone else: a lover, a family member, a teacher; a colleague, a conservatory director, a competition jury; a dozen distracted listeners in a bar, a thousand attentive listeners in a concert hall. These situations are all manifestations of the same principle, which we might call “from the composer to you, via me.” A musician playing by herself, to herself is also manifesting the principle, because . . . because the walls have ears, and what will the walls say?

And the musician gets a little nervous. Very nervous. Windmill-in-a-storm-nervous. H-bomb-nervous. I’d-rather-slit-my-wrists-than-play-for-the-walls-nervous.

I think this is a central feature of music-making, and a central feature of life for everyone. If you’re not a musician, read on and mentally translate the post to suit your needs. Vast subject, brief discussion, we scratch the surface, the surface scratches us back.

Audiences (“other people”) have expectations (“problems”). By wanting or hoping to fulfill other people’s expectations, you (1) usurp their role and (2) sabotage your priorities. To begin with, you can’t really know what is in another guy’s mind and heart; the other guy probably doesn’t know himself. You make assumptions about expectations. More precisely, you make unwarranted assumptions about other people’s mysterious and contradictory expectations, or as Sigmund Freud used to say, “oy vey ¡ay caramba! oh la la.” To meet another guy’s expectations is an impossible job, and it’s not even your job. It’s the other guy’s job to marinate his own expectations, slow-roast them, and eat them with salsa picante.

What to do? “My job is to show you my growth, my change, as it happens in this room, in this workshop, in this rehearsal, in this performance. I show you ‘my today,’ and if you’re curious about ‘my tomorrow’ please come back tomorrow. Do you know how painful it’d be for me to show you not ‘my today’ but ‘someone else’s yesterday’?”

A colleague and friend of mine once told me that one of her students was very disappointed with me—a student I’ve never met. “He admired you a lot because of your book, but then he went on YouTube and saw what you were doing these days.” This made me laugh. A stranger used to love me, and now he hates me. Should I have cherished his anonymous and undeclared love, and should I now fear his hatred, just as anonymous and only declared through a third party? His love and hatred aren’t my business. My business is to live, breathe, sense, react, make a choice, take an initiative, and perhaps grow and change. You may witness some of it: through a book, a blog post, a YouTube video clip, a greeting, a lesson, a joke funny or unfunny, a moment of impatience or thoughtlessness, my quirks and flaws (or, as Freud famously wrote, “Meine Warts-und-Farts”) (in his 1910 treatise Der Die Das, Des Den Dem, Dada Mama) (which he didn’t write but actually dictated) (to his nanny) (who was called Cigar) (but let’s not go there).

Everything you do today is a preparation for everything that you’ll do tomorrow. If this isn’t the case, “there is no tomorrow.” Baby to toddler, child to adolescent, 15 to 16, 16 to 17, and onward evermore. There have been a few cases in which a toddler went straight to old age, skipping the in-between stages. These cases are generally considered tragic. Intermediate steps are necessary, obligatory, inevitable, desirable, usually fun, occasionally a pain in the—wait. What am I saying?

Everything is an intermediate step to something else.

It’s an absolute law, from which there are no exceptions.

Practicing, performing, passing an audition, entering a competition, winning, losing, anything that a musician does is an intermediate step. To deny the intermediateness of life is an existential illness as grave as the Seelenjucken, the Angstsuppe, the Mutterkomplex. Freud couldn’t stand it when his patients Denied the Intermediateness, and he delighted in labeling different shades of the disease according to the physiognomy (nose, chin, earlobes, Koiffure) of the sufferer. If you don’t believe me, look up his posthumous monograph Telefunken im Volkswagen.

How many intermediate steps? Dozens, hundreds, thousands—depending on the task and the person. How long? Seconds, minutes, centuries—depending on the task and the person. But it goes much faster if you embrace the intermediateness.

Everything, every last thing is intermediate and in flux. Books get revised and rewritten. The Bible is three thousand years old but it’s still being tweaked, in translations and interpretations. Also, the Catholic, the Protestant, and the Jewish bibles are quite distinct. There doesn’t exist “one Bible, fixed and objective.” A musician might record the same piece multiple times in his or her career. The pioneering cellist Anner Bylsma, for instance, recorded two complete sets of the solo suites by Johann Sebastian Bach, in 1979 and 1992. Does the later recording invalidate the earlier one? Should Bylsma be punished for having at his disposal more than one way of playing the same piece? There doesn’t exist “one performance, one recording, fixed and objective.”

Compositions, too, get revised and transformed. Johannes Brahms published two versions of his Piano Trio in B major, in 1854 and 1889. The two versions are significantly different, and some people would consider them different pieces as opposed to two versions of the same piece. Mahler and Brückner kept revising their symphonies long after their premieres and long after they had been published in print. Mozart kept composing some of his masterpieces in the very act of performing them: the composition was partly born of the performance. A composition isn’t a “thing,” but a field of possibilities, some of which are crystallized more readily than others.

Logically enough, when you embrace the intermediateness of everything you solve many problems (though usually not the Mutterkomplex). You practice more gladly, you perform more willingly, you think of yourself more tenderly. “I’m intermediating between yesterday and tomorrow, yay! Come to my party!”

Okay, I talked too much and told too many Freud jokes (or “Freud’s rhoids”). In repentance, I offer you a numbered list with constructive advice.

  1. Play the same composition or snippet multiple times in a public setting, like a workshop or in that bar with the Inattentive Dozen Listeners. Play and enjoy, play and tweak, play and exaggerate, play and vary, play and play.

  2. Practice out of pleasure, not out of obligation. When asked why he continued to practice the cello three hours a day at the age of 93, the cellist, conductor, and composer Pablo Casals answered, "I'm beginning to notice some improvement.”

  3. When you get really good at something, become a beginner in something else. Got the hang of playing the cello? Take up the French horn. Zen mind, beginner’s mind. And share your beginnerness. If you embrace intermediateness, your beginnerness is more lovely than the expertness of someone who refuses intermediateness.

  4. On the eve of his foretold death, Socrates received a visitor. The visitor was surprised to find Socrates studying the rudiments of Persian. “Why, if you’re going to die tomorrow?” “I’ve always wanted to learn Persian,” Socrates answered. “It’s a beautiful language.”

  5. Perfection is the acceptance of imperfection.

  6. Learn the Ultimate Question; to it, give the Ultimate Answer. The learning is immediate, as long as you sync your breath and your heartbeat. “Do you love being perfect?” “Yes, totally! Thank you!”

  7. Language is strange and revealing. “This blog post is now finished.” “This blogger is now finished!” No! I have finished, but I’m not finished! I am famished, but I’m not Finnish! I am famous, but I’m not fishy! The famous famished Finnish fish is finished. Or, to put it differently: let’s be careful about using the word “finished” as regards our artistic processes.

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

The Other Helicopter

A little while ago I posted a paragraph on LinkedIn. It was part of a weekly series I’ve been doing this year, using photos that I’ve taken in the Place des Vosges to illustrate the symbolic dimensions of life, with a little metaphysics and some humor thrown into the mix.

A friendly connection on LinkedIn reached out to me. He was puzzled by my post. “What does all of this refer to, Pedro?”

Ah. Yes. Right.

Thanks to my friendly connection, I got thinking about the nature of communication, about ways of seeing the world and ways of talking about it, about potentially incomprehensible things that—that, well, we don’t comprehend and that leave us baffled, puzzled, or worse.

Here’s the photo that illustrates my post.

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 And here’s my original post.

 52 Mondays #31: August 2, Levitation
 
We can fly. Perhaps not very high and not for very long, but we leave the ground and we move up and away. We fly! No planes needed, no air traffic controllers, no airports, no duty free; just legs and life. Some of us get really good at it—Cristiano Ronaldo, for instance, can fly more than seven meters aboveground and hover for as long as five minutes. And some of us get so good, but so good at it that we fly to the moon and back, at the speed of light, without leaving our armchairs. This technique, which is called “esplodere in testa,” was developed by Leonardo da Vinci in 1519, building on Dante’s “elicottero dell'anima” from around 1321. Ultimately, it’s very simple: sit, close your eyes, and fly, fly, fly!

Your feet literally leave the ground when you run, jump, or skip. It’s what my photo shows: a boy running, his feet not touching the ground. The boy isn’t flying the same way that a Boeing 787 flies from Charles de Gaulle to JFK. But, look! His feet aren’t touching the ground! So, he’s kinda flying, just a little bit, don’t you see! I’m using my snapshot to trigger a sort of head trip. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could fly without wings, with the power of our feet and legs and mind . . .”

The post starts with a brief affirmative statement: We can fly. Sure: using planes, gliders, helicopters, rockets, maybe a jetpack, a parachute, a trampoline. Or by jumping from a burning building to a safe net provided by the firemen below. There are many actual technical ways for humans to fly. My affirmative statement, however, risks creating confusion, because I’m not talking primarily about physical flight. I’m talking about the feeling of flying that we get from dreams, or from surprising experiences in daily life when the excitement of a discovery (or a breakthrough, or some good news, or the solution to a longstanding problem) gives you a high. If you’re high, you’re symbolically flying!

I have a deep dislike of airport duty-free shops. I consider them toxic and perverse. Airport design forces you to walk through the shops and breathe in the allergy-inducing odors of perfume. Shady billionaires who stay out of public view profit mightily from their grip on duty-free shopping. In my post I made a passing reference to duty free as a way of saying that “ideal flying” is different from “habitual flying.” Ideally, you’d “fly free” instead of “duty free.” In this context, duty free becomes a representation of all that’s wrong with commercialism, greed, tobacco pushers, profiteers, tax cheaters, and—“Pedro, calm down. Fly free instead of duty free. We get it!”

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Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese soccer player, is one of the greatest athletes of all time. Among other things, he can jump quite high. On YouTube his jumps are often depicted in slow motion, and then it looks as if he's jumping super-high and staying aloft for a long time: he’s flying! In my LinkedIn post I take his ability and exaggerate it: seven meters high, five minutes long, wow. Exaggeration is a lie, but the lie hints at the symbolic truth of perception, imagination, and possibility. Subsequently I took one of Ronaldo’s jumping goals and created a little remix, with my own soundtrack. Now we have exaggeration and distortion in a multimedia setting, at the service of metaphysics. The soundtrack hypnotizes you, the images beguile you, and you become a true believer: “Human flying, with no jetpack, no nothing! I’ve seen it with these very eyes!”

Cristiano Ronaldo is a brilliant innate talent, and he works extremely hard at maintaining and improving his athletic skills. In his own way, he flies admirably. But what about us, average men and women with the character defect of being disembodied introverted intellectuals, unfit and lazy and—hey, we can fly too! Because the kind of flying we’re talking about is an activity of the imagination. And the imagination is the most powerful of all human attributes. We imagine problems (we’re really good at it!) and we imagine solutions (we’re pretty decent at it!). We imagine fears, situations, conversations, relationships, theories, friends, enemies, gods, and devils; we imagine a whole universe. And if we imagine our own flight, up we go: to the moon and back, at the speed of light.

The Leonardo and Dante remarks are jokes that also play the role of “labyrinth entry points.” Leonardo was supremely creative. And a creative spark sometimes feels like an explosion in your head. I Google-translated the expression “explode in the head” into Italian, and "esplodere in testa" was born. I added the date of Leonardo’s death, 1521, which possibly is another joke—maybe Leonardo died from his exploding testa. Or maybe he was already dead when he invented this remarkable creative technique.

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Leonardo worked as a military engineer for one of his patrons. It appears that he also designed a sort of pioneering theoretical helicopter, which centuries later would inspire aspects of modern aeronautics. Through a process of free association, the expression "helicopter of the soul" came to my mind while I was day-dreaming about Leonardo. I Google-translated it, and now we have the famous “elicottero dell'anima,” which didn’t exist until I imagined it.

But I decided to assign this invention not to the Leonardo of my imagination, but to the Dante of my imagination. Dante’s La Divina Commedia leads the reader through the passage or ascent from hell to heaven, perhaps the ultimate flight. As with my Leonardo joke, I chose to refer to the year of Dante’s death, 1321. Thanks to it a metaphysically inclined person might get thinking about death, eternity, and all that. Also, isn’t 1321 a lovely number in itself? Say it out loud: one-three-two-ONE! Numerology. Gematria. The Kabbalah. Numbers are wonderful triggers of symbolic speculation, or “labyrinth entry points.” You know . . . the labyrinth of the imagination. The Labyrinth of Life.

Incidentally, I know very little about Leonardo and Dante (or the Kabbalah or gematria). My jokes don’t demonstrate that I’m erudite; they demonstrate that I’m silly. But Wikipedia is there for you to visit and explore. All you need is a first step: “Dante,” for instance. His Wikipedia page has dozens of hyperlinks to other pages, each of which has dozens of hyperlinks to other pages, each of which . . . You’ll esplodere in testa, mamma mia! You can also attempt to read Divina Commedia, in the original or in translation. Life is short, though Dante is eternal. “La vita è breve, ma Dante è eterno.”

I concluded my LinkedIn paragraph with a brief statement. Paraphrasing and plagiarizing George Bernard Shaw, let me quote myself, to spice up the conversation: “Ultimately, it’s very simple: sit, close your eyes, and fly, fly, fly!” This is an abbreviated affirmation of the power of the imagination.

My original paragraph has less than 150 words. My explanation of what I tried to pack into it is ten times longer. The German word for “poet” is Dichter, which comes from Dichte, “density.” The poet condenses language and makes a few words say a lot of things. The language of the symbolic dimension, of metaphor and metaphysics, is necessarily distinct from the language of the material world, of technique and physical facts.

A helicopter manual reads very differently from La Divina Commedia.

To the materially inclined, metaphor seems incomprehensible (and probably reprehensible too). But We The Imaginatively Inclined, we need, we need—we need!—exaggeration, distortion, lies, jokes, allusions, ambiguity, neologisms, fake erudition, uncredited paraphrases, free association, non sequiturs, ad hoc, pro bono, and lies. And jokes. It’s our attempt at grasping the ungraspable, which according to Dante “è la cosa più importante nella vita.”

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©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

Baby Drives a Stick Shift!

Impossible, difficult, easy. This is the archetypal road in life, bumpy but exciting.

Can the baby drive a stick shift? An automatic, maybe—an outside chance. A stick shift, no. The pedal work is out of reach. Actually, some automobile models are designed for very little drivers. But difficulties remain.

What’s easy is “physically easy.” The baby driving the stick shift along Route 66 is relaxed and happy, from head to toes. Do you know how relaxed are the toes of a relaxed baby? Wonder of wonders. But the easeful state only exists because the baby “doesn’t think difficult.” No doubts, no fears, no suppositions, no preconceived ideas, no excuses, no questions, no pretzels-in-the-pysche (or as Sigmund Freud used to say, “keine Brezeln in der Psyche”).

Easy brain, easy driving. It’s in the Highway Code.

A situation requires that you do something. Let’s say you’re taking language classes and your teacher asks you to translate a certain phrase from your mother tongue to the foreign one, the alien, the different, the unknown. Your very first reaction might be to think, to feel, and to say out loud: “This is difficult.” Or it might be your second reaction, after you make a feeble half-assed attempt (“halber Arsch,” sagt Sigmund) at a translation. If you try once, twice, ten times, a thousand times and you can’t manage the task, perhaps you may be right in saying that it’s difficult. But if you try zero times or maybe a single buttock (“halber Arsch”), then you don’t really mean, “This task requires quite a lot of expertise, which I lack.” You mean, “I’m being asked to leave my comfort zone. I have emotions, a history, an ingrained fear; very irrational to you, but very real to me, thank you very much! Your request pushes a button, triggers a trigger, triggers a Tiger. This is difficult!”

I’ve witnessed this dozens of times in my teaching career. The amazing thing is that, immediately after saying “This is difficult,” the student goes on to perform the task pretty well, flawlessly even. To my way of thinking, it proves that the statement wasn’t about “the thing itself,” the task, the objective situation. And, also to my way of thinking, it proves that “to acknowledge is to evacuate.”

To share your discomfort with a friendly witness lessens or dissipates the discomfort.

In Sigmund-lingo: Anerkennen heißt evakuieren, und ich spreche kein Deutsch, das ist alles aus dem Internet.

There’s the thing, and there’s our perspective on the thing. Our perspective feels so concrete, so embodied in us that we confuse it with the thing. We become sure, sure, sure that we’re thinking and talking about the thing, when in fact we’re thinking and talking about our own selves. We sometimes have a flash of clarity by proxy. “This tax form is impossible to fill,” someone says. “Idiotic bureaucracy!” And we look at the damn form, and it’s pretty straightforward, and the instructions are clear, and all you have to do is to write in a number and check a box. And we understand that our friend has amalgamated his or her deep-seated and long-held emotions with the form, the task, the appliance, the musical instrument, the medical procedure, the social obligation, the—well, you know what I’m talking about.

The thing doesn’t have to be you, and you don’t have to be the thing.

Sigmund, sing your song!

“Das Ding muss nicht du sein,

und du musst nicht das Ding sein.”

I’ll do a numbered list for you: “The Seven Habits of Highly Confusing Geminis.”

  1. Your mind plays a role.

  2. Some things are “literally impossible.” Don’t confuse them with things that are “not-literally impossible.”

  3. Man or woman not yet born for whom EVERYTHING IS EASY.

  4. “Things change.” “You change.” “Your relationship with things change.”

  5. Not every numbered list is useful.

  6. Just because it’s easy for you it doesn’t mean that “it” is easy.

  7. Pedrito, you’ve made it to the end of another blog post! Auf Wiedersehn!

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

Rooted

The other day I tested a hypothesis: What is it like to plant myself in a fixed spot, and take as many photos as possible from that spot? The rules of the game are simple. Choose the spot. Plant your feet. Move any way you want, as long as you do not—do not!—move your feet. Twist your trunk, turn your head and neck 270 degrees, do the Pretzel, do the Möbius Strip, do the Camel’s Hump, the Crab, and the Wheelbarrow. Just don’t take a step, okay?

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Okay!

I went to the Place des Vosges and stood by one of the entrances on the northern side of the square. It was 10:30 in the morning on a sunny day. My plan was to stay rooted for 60 minutes, keeping the camera settings on automatic and without zooming in or out, everything fixed except for heart and brain (and upper body). I ended up taking 282 snapshots. Few qualify as good photographs. But, boy, was it fun!

My spot was liminal—a frontier or portal through which people entered and exited the Place des Vosges. I could see the Place and also the main street that runs along it, plus another street that runs into it at a 90-degree angle.

It’s pretty normal for a guy to just stand by the entrance of the Place and do nothing. This means that “nobody saw me” even though “I saw everyone.”

Children coming in with their minders. Visitors from various countries, talking animatedly in languages I didn’t speak. Harried workers rushing through, going from A to B with an obligation to perform or deliver. Joggers, some passing by my spot multiple times while I stood there.

I achieved a minor victory: For years I’ve been noticing a groundskeeper at the Place, gruff and disinclined to talk to you or even acknowledge your existence. While I stood at my spot he came around on one of his errands and he asked me, “Comment ça va?” That’s French for “How ya doin’?” He walked away quickly, having sensed that I could have hugged him.

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I had a good line of sight of much of the Place, except for the narrow blind spot behind me which I couldn’t see however I turned and twisted. I could see the big trees in the middle of the square, which I’ve always called the Broccoli. I could see the sky, the pure unimpeded blueness faraway. Up close I could see the spiked ironworks that surround the square. Lamp posts and pigeons I could see, also many façades. I could stare at the sun.

I could see so much, and I could look at things really closely, and I could let me eyes linger and marvel at the beauty of it all.

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Traffic was light on the street north of the Place des Vosges, but I saw trucks, pedestrians, cyclists, little kids in “locomotive contraptions,” to use a generic term for scooters and prams and suchlike.

A troupe of professionals came in to do a fashion photo shoot. It was a large team more than ten strong, everyone carrying walkie talkies (which the French call “talkie walkies”). After a while a friendly member from the troupe approached me. “You’re standing in the way of our shot,” he said. Oh the tragedy! I had been at my spot for 55 minutes, and ideally I’d stay another five, just for the sake of cosmogonics. But I took his hint and abandoned my spot. Truth be told, my right foot had fallen asleep and I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Back home I went.

Jean de la Fontaine, that fabulous fabulist, would have said it well, had he said it. “Enracine-toi sur place et tu verras le monde.” Root yourself to a spot, and you’ll see the World.

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©2021, Pedro de Alcantara