To choose, or not to choose

Agency is a wonderful and strange thing. I mean the capacity to choose, to decide, and to act, on your own behalf or for the benefit of someone else; the feeling that you have some degree of control over your life, your work, your circumstances, your reactions; the feeling that you can think for yourself and speak your mind. It’s a big deal, and it’s something that we all need to pursue, and also help others to pursue it for themselves. To be given agency, oh what a precious gift! To take the plunge or not to take the plunge? You choose.

Some choices are banal: today I’m wearing this shirt, not that other one. (But let it be said that what’s banal for me isn’t necessary banal for someone else; there are people for whom choosing the daily shirt is a terror.) I’m having coffee now, and I’ll have tea later. I’m not going to the movies tonight. In any given week I’ll say yes or no to a thousand things, and this is a manifestation of my agency.

Other choices are less banal. (But let it be said . . . you know, people are different from one another.) A job opening; do I apply for it? The consequences of applying or not applying are bigger than the consequences of wearing a red shirt rather than a blue one; the consequences of being accepted or rejected by the new employer are bigger than coffee and tea. I might dither for days, weeks, months, years, or decades regarding some of my more important choices. Agency, as so much else in life, isn’t always straightforward. If you “accept to dither,” the very acceptance is proof that you have agency.

Warning! It’ll look as if I’m suddenly changing the subject!

The other day I went to see a retrospective of Mark Rothko’s work at the Fondation Louis Vuitton here in Paris. There were about 120 paintings, covering the entirety of his long and fruitful career. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t familiar with his work, or if you are indifferent to it, or if you love it or hate it. The main thing here is my theory or hypothesis that Rothko, while expressing his agency moment by moment and day by day, was also grabbed by powerful, invisible forces that “made him do things,” that forced him to change and grow, that imposed a sort of forward motion to his life, that “didn’t give him a choice.”

Simplifying it, he started his creative path by painting figurative scenes, people at the subway in New York City, landscapes. Then came war and strife, and the artist in Rothko felt that it was urgent and necessary to present, in his art, something more urgent and more healing than the subway scenes. Rothko was drawn to Surrealism and its involvement with symbols, and figuration became transformed into a sort of more or less mythical storytelling. But over the years the details of the attempted mythical storytelling lost importance, and Rothko felt (or “was made to feel”) that he and his paintings must, must pass through a sort of portal and enter another realm: the territory of the eternal and universal, of the mysterious, of the overwhelming, of the pure and strong and inexplicable. Squares and rectangles of color, subtly interacting one with the other in vast canvasses “without people,” without subway stations, without symbols, without detailed storytelling, but allowing you to tell the most incredible stories to your own deepest self. As I said, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know Rothko or don’t like him; I’m just saying that Rothko was absolutely compelled to pass through the portal.

This is the paradox of agency: I have choice and I have no choice; I think I want to pursue plan A, but plan B has stopped me on my tracks and took over my life; I don’t understand where this impulse comes from, but I have to obey it.

These days the cliché says that you must “find your passion” and make it the defining trait of your life and your work, and you also must keeping saying out loud, very loud, and to everyone, what you’re passionate about. I think a bit differently. You don’t find the passion; the passion will find you, and you’ll submit to it willingly or unwillingly. You’ll have to let go of your misapprehensions and misunderstandings regarding who you are and what you have to do. You’ll have to abandon and to give up many things, some of which are very dear to you. It’s a loss; and yet, surrendering is the ultimate victory.

©2023, Pedro de Alcantara

Practice is Meaning

I have a very astute student who brings many insights into our dialogue. The other day he was talking about a man he knows well. My student described him as perfectly nice and friendly, a good human being. But there was something missing, he said. Searching for words, my student remarked that this man didn’t have a practice.

My mind is like a Christmas tree strung with red and green lights. If I see, hear, or think something dubious or harmful or confused or incoherent, a red light goes on: Wait! And if I see, hear, or think something constructive, creative, playful, or healing, a green light goes on: Yes!

I can’t be absolutely sure that my student and I approach the notion of practice in the same way, but I’m using his remark to adorn my tree, which my student’s remark lit up, with a bunch of green lights of my own devising.

Practice, as I see it, is a sort of commitment to explore something. The exploration unfolds steadily over months, years, and decades. There’s a repetitive element involved, and also variation, novelty, sudden changes of rhythm or focus. The exploration envelops a paradox. Practice is time spent focusing on myself and not focusing on myself. By asking myself questions while practicing, by pondering my habits, my assumptions, and my inner narrative, I might affirm my individuality and at the same time lessen my importance to my own self. “I rock! I’m just a rock.”

What might the exploration or practice involve? The possibilities are endless. It might be the study of music: handling instruments, learning the structures of music, listening, playing, going out to concerts, sharing, listening, playing, listening, playing. In my case, I consider that I’ve been in music practice for about sixty years. The practice has dug deep grooves in my brain, and it has shape my life in so many ways that I can’t begin to describe it.

Or the practice might be walking. For some, it might be the ten thousand daily steps, a sort of dance and meditation, “the gym of the mind.” Walking is a communion with the city where you live and the cities that you visit: you receive the city from the ground up, and your legs, your movement, and your rhythms create urban memories that inform your perspective in life. A walkable city is a marvelous arena for practicing. A city where cars are more important than people . . . well, driving too can be a purposeful practice. A different friend of mine is a musician of breadth and depth. He drove a taxi professionally for a few years, and it seems obvious to me that his driving helped him Achieve Knowledge (and that’s not the same thing as achieving knowledge or achieving “knowledge”).

The practice might be cooking. Recipes and spices become a discipline, giving you faint but lovely connections with Madagascar, Lebanon, Mexico, Peru, and the World and the Universe and the ALL-UPPERCASE. Or the discipline might be how you handle a knife and how you slice a tomato. I’m sure, sure! that somewhere on this Earth there’s a person who’s attained Buddhahood by Slicing the Thousand Tomatoes (and the One Finger).

Repetition on its own has many merits, but the kind of practice we’re positing here requires alertness, curiosity, involvement, observation, persistence. I actually think it’s possible for someone to just “go through the motions” of his or her practice and still get something out of it. But when you pay attention to what you’re doing, how you’re doing, why you’re doing it, what kind of person you are while you’re doing it, and what kind of person you become through doing it, the repetitiveness is a gift like no other. Your field of perception expands. You acquire skills. You accumulate memories, stories, sights and sounds attached to your practice. Practice gives you direction, and direction gives you meaning, and meaning gives you meaning. Also, Practice Gives You A Blanket, Heavy And Cozy And Soft.

Knitted by Alexis Niki over many months.

 ©2023, Pedro de Alcantara

The Capital Joy

A little kid stands by a piano and plucks a few notes at random. Oscar Peterson sits at a piano and plucks thousands of notes, seemingly at random but in trained, intelligent, creative response to a grid of chords with a time signature and a strict number of bars.

The kid and Peterson are both improvising. Call them the Beginner and the Master, and put them at the extremes of a continuum with infinite gradations. Then place yourself somewhere along the continuum—maybe very close to the Beginner, maybe a few or several gradations more sophisticated than the Total Baby Beginner Born Yesterday. The main thing is for you to understand that anyone, anyone, ANYONE! can improvise at the piano (or the harp or the French horn). And also to understand that the way you define a concept determines your behavior.

I like thinking of improvisation as an archetypical energy, manifesting itself in thousands of different ways. The kid and Peterson; Peterson and Bach; Bach and Beethoven; Beethoven and a dog standing on its hind legs, pushing down keys and howling.

Improvisation-as-archetype manifests itself in your own life, in dozens of ways, often without your realizing it. Traffic is blocked when you’re driving to the office; you improvise a new route. A friend shows up unannounced at dinner time; you improvise a salad with the few ingredients you have in your fridge. Conversation is Improvisation. (The capital “I” suddenly lets us see that the concept is big, eternal, widespread, vital, Archetypal.) Talking to a stranger or a friend or a client or a child, you make up phrases, paragraphs, arguments. With incredible mental dexterity, you string together words and thoughts from your gigantic inner database, and you do so at high speed and often while multitasking. It means that you’re a natural-born, skillful Improviser.

Baby crying? Improvise a soothing solution. You don’t speak Italian and you’re visiting Florence? Improvise a way to communicate. All your shirts are in the washer? Improvise an outfit. You get caught cheating? Improvise an explanation. The improvised response sometimes makes a situation worse, sometimes makes it better; sometimes it solves a problem, sometimes it saves a life.

Let’s imagine another continuum, from improvisation to structure. At the extremes of the continuum live two types of terribly unhealthy human beings: the one totally lacking in the necessary organization of structure, and the one totally lacking in the necessary adaptability of improvisation. We might imagine new therapies, new pedagogies: the doctor tells you to go pluck random notes at the piano, and at first you say no, never, not in a million years, not me, and then you pluck two notes and you hate the piano and you hate the doctor and you hate yourself, and then you pluck two more notes and you say, Wait a minute. Pluck, pluck, pluck, I’m reborn!

The improvisatory response or impulse is a sort of biological function, like breathing and circulation, digestion and sleep. What would happen if you decided that “breathing isn’t for you”? The world record for holding one’s breath is 24 minutes and 37 seconds, although this takes a lot of training. Without training, you’d pass out or pass away if you didn’t breathe for one minute. I think this also apply to improvisation. If you thought or felt that “improvisation isn’t for you,” you’d be at risk.

Once you understand that the Beginner and the Master are both Improvising, you’ll accept that you too are an Improviser, by birth and by nature. It settles the issue. You can Embrace your Nature and Set Out to Develop your Improvisatory Responses to Life. It’s a Capital Joy.

©2023, Pedro de Alcantara

My friend Brancusi

Let me paraphrase Constantin Brancusi (1876 – 1957), the great Romanian-French sculptor: “Things aren’t difficult to do. What’s difficult is to put ourselves in the state of mind of doing them.”

What exactly did Brancusi say, when, and in what language? What did he mean by it, and how did he embody it in his life and work? “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, and I don’t know. But here I am, feeling good and sensing that his words–or these words attributed to him–might be useful to me and to some of my readers.”

Principle #1: Acknowledge the subjectivity of interpretation. Principle #2: Acknowledge the limits of your knowledge and understanding. Principle #3: Feeling good is generally more helpful than feeling bad.

To make an omelet, you need to break some eggs. And you need some eggs to begin with. A chicken needs to have laid some eggs. And the supply chain needs to bring some eggs to within your reach. And the logistics experts—never mind. You get my point.

Principle #4: There’s always a thing before another thing. Your state of mind precedes and prepares your actions. It actually determines your actions.

The notion of difficulty varies from person to person. For someone, giving a speech in public is a breeze, a delight. Anytime, sure! Any subject, sure! And for someone else, it’s torture. Many people actually say they’d rather die than speak in public. And the gentleman or the lady who loves speaking in public hates opening cans of tuna. They’d rather die of hunger, or order in, or eat reheated chulé de ontem (where I come from, this isn’t a delicacy). Anything but the can!

Principle #5: To be human is to face difficulties. And to be this one human is to face difficulties potentially quite different from those other humans.

Suppose you know for a fact that you will definitely do something that you’re dreading but that you can’t avoid. Typical examples are dealing with in-laws, dentists, tax officials, or funeral arrangements for people other than your mother-in-law. But humans are quite different one from the other, and there are people who love their mothers-in-law (to death!). These are just illustrative examples. I start again: You’re definitely going to do something that you’re dreading. Then it really helps if you actually agree to do it. It’s going to happen anyway, right? You might as well diminish your resistance, resign yourself to the activity, and do it.

Principle #6: Kicking and screaming, you end up hurt yourself first and foremost.

How long does it take to learn a foreign language? As long as it takes. How long does it take to go through your tax receipts? As long as it takes. How long does it take to embalm your mother-in-law? Actually, this is the exception to the rule, thanks to the advantages of incineration.

Principle #7: Agreeing to take the time needed to accomplish a task shortens the time needed to accomplish it.

What are you actually trying to accomplish or make or get rid of? Some clarity helps. You don’t want to incinerate the wrong person just because “you weren’t thinking.” This applies to all tasks, however simple.

Principle #8: Clarify the task, and clarify the intermediate steps needed to accomplish the task. Don’t take your own clarity for granted. Incineration is irreversible.

Brancusi was a great artist who made the most beautiful sculptures and who had an interesting, meaningful, rich life. He entered immortality through his creative efforts, his discipline, his risk-taking. By most measures, or perhaps by all measures, he’s a much greater artist than myself, for example. I don’t stand a chance!

Principle #9: Comparing yourself to other people distracts you from that frame of mind in which it’s easier to do things.

 Brancusi also said this:

Simplicity is complexity resolved.
Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave.
To see far is one thing, going there is another.
Whoever does not detach himself from the ego never attains the Absolute and never deciphers life.

Principle #10: When it comes to the frame-of-mind thing, wonderment and gratitude tend to work better than envy and jealousy.

©2023, Pedro de Alcantara

The World

The other day I decided to go spend some time at the Gare de Lyon, a major train station in central Paris. If you’re traveling down south, to Lyon and Marseille and Switzerland and Italy, it’s here that you’ll board your train. And it’s here too that you arrive in Paris if you’re coming from those other marvelous cities and countries.

Over the decades that I’ve lived in Paris, I’ve been to the Gare the Lyon hundreds of times. But there’s a big difference between going somewhere with the goal of doing something, and going somewhere with the goal of being there. To linger, to see, to explore; to photograph and to record; to talk to people . . . it’s very different from taking a train to go on a dutiful business trip.

This map gives you a notion of the station’s size and its many entrances and exits. There are three halls where trains arrive and depart; two of the halls are contiguous. Underground, there are two metro lines and two suburban express lines, their tracks far enough from one another that it might take you ten minutes to walk from the express track to the local one—or from the metro to your train track. Imagine this is your first visit to the station; you don’t speak French, you’re a little late for your train, the day is hot and the station is crowded. To navigate the Gare the Lyon isn’t easy. People miss their trains, people get lost, people have emotions.

Now imagine that you’re at the station not because you have to, but because you want to. You’re not late catching a train; time is suspended, especially for you. 30 minutes, three hours; you stay for as short or as long as you wish. It’s like visiting a museum, a beach, a city square, a monument: exploration for the love of exploration, for the love of architecture, art, and history, for the love of seeing things and watching people and interacting with the world.

A few years ago I did the same thing at the Châtelet-Les Halles metro station, and I blogged about it here. You don’t have to be in Paris or in a beautiful city to undertake the exploration. Recently a group of my students and I explored an underground parking garage with three levels—a well-built, clean, safe, cinematic space. We slowly descended level by level, we stood in corners and along walls and passages, we sang drones and songs to amazing acoustics, we watched cars drive by with funny-looking families looking funny at us. I don’t know how long the exploration lasted; maybe 45 minutes, maybe one hour. Then we “came out into the open” through a discreet door that led directly to the sidewalk outside, and the perceptual shock of fresh air and city bustle was awesome.

At the Gare de Lyon, a singer-songwriter was performing in one of the corridors. The public-transport system auditions buskers every year. There are designated spots for musicians in stations, corridors, and hallways. Kuku is an American of Yoruban-Nigerian origin. I watched him talk with great care and patience to a woman—a passerby—who wanted his attention. Afterward I too wanted his attention, and he talked to me with great care and patience. Then he performed and I recorded him. His life-affirming music resonated left and right.

An attractive young man with a pleasant disposition was sitting at a store selling phone accessories. We chatted, and I asked him if I could take his photo. The idea tickled him. Another pleasant your man, working for the metro, was happy to be photographed but wasn’t sure his bosses would agree to it. He hammed and hawed very sweetly, and then I told him I’d “take his photo against his wishes” and he could tell the bosses that there was nothing he could have done about it. He smiled and “I shot him.” A traveler trying to find out where his train would leave from approached me for assistance. He had a lovely hat on, and a kind, relaxed demeanor. He let me take his portrait, and we parted ways not knowing each other’s names. There were four security guards in one of the halls, two men and two women. The women didn’t want to be photographed, no way! The men agreed readily, and it felt to me that one of the guys was trying to prove to the girls that he was tough and fearless! Let the strange stranger photograph me, what do I care!

If you don’t know the station and if you’re distracted by crowds and announcements, you might not see that there’s an incredible restaurant up on the second floor. Le Train Bleu was built at the same time as the Grand Palais, the Petit Palais, and the bridge Alexandre III, all of it related to the universal exposition of 1900. The architectural style of the restaurant has been called “neo-Baroque Belle Époque.” There is a warren of spaces beyond the restaurant proper where you can sit and relax with a coffee, or have meetings with other important people like you. Is the coffee expensive or cheap? It depends on how you pay attention to the setting, the people, the history of the place. The more attention you pay, the cheaper the coffee gets.

The esplanade in front of the main entrance to the station always has art, photographs, and suchlike in big panels displayed in rows. On this visit there were, among other things, reproductions of drawings from a show that took place in Arles last spring. You can’t see the art without seeing the people sitting against the art, chatting and smoking; or the boy peeing against the art; or the idle passersby waiting for Godot.

I was at the station for two hours, and not for a second did I feel bored. The station, “like the world,” merits repeated visits.

©2023, Pedro de Alcantara

A Year of Creativity

A year ago (on July 30, 2022 exactly) I started drawing with brush and ink. Back then I wrote about how it all came about. I thought you might be interested in some of the things I learned about the creative process during this wonderful year.

1. Creativity is the interaction of doing something for the first time (or as if for the first time) and doing the same thing hundreds or thousands of time. The innocent child is sometimes more creative than the jaded expert. We’re all familiar with beginner’s luck, which we can also call Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (the title of a famous, excellent little book). Not knowing what you’re getting into gives you a sort of freedom. And if you’d like to “practice the freedom,” so to speak, you have two good choices: keep learning new things; or learn how to “remain new inside.”

2. Creativity, like everything else, has a rhythm—its own rhythm, for you to discover and to play with. I mean the rhythms of a long-term project (conception, creation, revision, publication), the rhythms of the seasons and days and hours, and the rhythms of the moment: you can drown if you jump onto the boat a second too late. It took me 64 years to start making these drawings; it takes me a few seconds or a minute to make some of them. If in the moment of making the drawing I’m in sync with The Rhythm . . . wow, the few seconds give birth to something beautiful and meaningful. And if I’m not in sync? Nah. Meh. Foo. Blah.

3. Creativity can be a response to an inner impulse or to an outside pressure or desire. You feel that you really, really need to do something and you can’t explain exactly why; or you feel that you’d like to compete with someone else, or to “produce” something. One is an inner impulse, the other is an outer impulse. We each have our own balance of these necessary forces, but my preference has been to listen to the inner and tune out the outer.

4. Creativity bubbles up from intuition and improvisation. Incomprehensible dreams that you don’t remember very well; sudden bursts of words that express a long-suppressed thought; decisions that aren’t decisions: out for a walk, you turn left instead of right, and you can’t say why you did that, and there you find yourself talking to a stranger who tells you something very special. In creative work, craft and skill are very important . . . but they come after the dreams and bursts and indecisions, not before them and above all not in place of them.

5. Creativity and the ego have an interesting dance. Creativity can be an affirmation of the ego (“I made this thing here! Look at it, and look at me!”) or a bypassing of the ego (“I don’t know if or how or why I made this”). With my own creative work, I feel that many things make themselves: drawings, poems, compositions, pedagogical insights. I kinda receive them and pass them along without a feeling of ownership. This takes trust and faith in the process; the absence of pride (which is a sort of inflation of the ego); and a more or less permanent state of wonderment and gratitude. Less ego, more flow!

6. Creative explorations happen in a context. In the case of my drawings, this included dozens of visits to museums and galleries, reading books, watching documentaries about the creative process, going for seemingly idle walks during which the creative process kept distilling itself in the background. Places and people, events, travels, sunny days and rainy days, siestas, biweekly visits to the street market: any one drawing of mine gathers the “totality of context” and expresses it in a piece of paper. Alertness to context helps creativity.

7. Creativity doesn’t necessarily mean pleasant experiences only. You might become obsessed with the process, and you might not sleep well or take care of your business. You might pick fights with people dear to you just because you’re in the middle of a creative burst, and those people dear to you have their own needs and wants, their own rhythms, their own demands (some of them reasonable!) on your time and your space. Beloved ones apart, you can also become frustrated, discouraged, bored, and etc. (to coin an emotion) in the work itself, and “in you.” It’s kinda normal!

8. Creativity takes your life in directions you can’t imagine or foresee. My drawings went places as if by themselves, and I tagged along to discover what the drawings wanted to do. Here’s an example: I passed from ink to gouache, and to a style I’ll call “post-childhood finger-drawing;” then I passed from finger-drawing to wrist-drawing and forearm-drawing. Whaaaat, forearm???? In the middle of my year-of-drawing-with-ink, I started writing some poems in Spanish, a language I’ve been studying with a lot of joy and some discipline. The poems were organically born of the drawings, but during the first few weeks and months of brush-ink-gouache-forearm exploration I totally didn’t expect their emergence. Plus, these poems became quite ambitious and intricate, partly in response to the theme of my drawings. Had you told me five years ago that I’d be officiating the happy marriage of Spanish and art, I’d have called you muy loco, ay caramba.

Would you like eight kitchen magnets? Here they are.

  1. Remain new inside.

  2. Rhythm is everything.

  3. Obey the inner impulse.

  4. Intuition before skill.

  5. Less ego, more flow.

  6. Be alert to the context.

  7. Displeasure exists.

  8. Creativity leads, you follow.

©2023, Pedro de Alcantara

Learning & Healing

Every process is a learning, and every learning is a healing. I know, I know; this is too absolute a statement, starting as it does with “every.” Every statement that starts with “every” is too absolute, therefore not true.

We start again: Some creative processes involve a lot of learning, and through the learning you get to feel good about yourself and about other people.

I recently spent a day recording four tracks of contemporary music for a CD project led by my friend Katharine Rawdon. An American flutist, composer, and improviser, Katharine has lived long enough in Lisbon to have become a Portuguese citizen. We recorded in Coimbra, a monumental city in the Portuguese heartland and the home of a great university first established in 1290. Yep, just short of a thousand years ago.

From any one fact we can draw connections to any other fact, usually through a hyperlinking sequence that only takes a handful of steps.

Coimbra >> university >> tradition and innovation.

An American in Lisbon >> A Night in Tunisia >> Casablanca.

Katharine >> Catherine of Aragon >> Sergio Aragonés >> MAD Magazine.

The creative process thrives on hyperlinking, even though hyperlinking gone wrong isn’t that different from paranoid psychosis, schizophrenia, and playing the cello upside down. It’s useful to know when and how to hyperlink, and when and how to wear a lead helmet to protect your brain from hyperlinking.

Lead helmet >> Helmut Kohl >> Kohlka Kola >> “Oh Calcutta!”

Katharine’s CD project contains about 12 pieces; my contribution to the program is partial. We recorded a piece of mine that I wrote ten years ago. Originally for voice and piano, on this CD “Disconsonance” will live in a gorgeous version for bass flute and piano, with me playing the piano. Katharine also wrote a bass-flute and piano piece, just as gorgeous: “Cerulean Voyage.” We also recorded Cindy McTee’s “Stepping Out,” for flute and claves (with me as the newborn clavista). Most importantly, we grappled with “Road to Mathura,” a piece that Katharine wrote for the two of us in which I have to sing, play the cello, and play percussion simultaneously, in 7/4 time, with polyrhythms and pizzicato and col legno and sul tasto and three-against-four and everyone-against-me. Blisters and calluses, fingers and brains, ketchup and mustard.

In advance of the recording, Katharine flew to Paris a few times for us to practice and rehearse. Together we tweaked the various compositions, helped each other learn our parts, talked, laughed, had dinner, laughed. The thing is, I couldn’t play any of those compositions perfectly, and I couldn’t play the blisters-and-calluses festival with any semblance of precision, comfort, mastery, inspiration, delicacy, intelligence, or sang-froid.

Sang-froid >> reptile >> swamp >> methane >> stink.

But, hey, we rehearsed, I practiced, I practiced some more, I got the hang of a couple of sections in the complicated piece, I practiced lots more and evermore, and by the time of the recording I didn’t embarrass my late mother, may she rest in peace wearing earplugs.

There was a week’s period immediately before the recording during which I didn’t play the cello, and I didn’t even have my cello with me. I recorded on Katharine’s daughter’s cello, and I only got the borrowed cello the day before the recording. Beforehand I gave a workshop in Porto, then I spent a few days in Matosinhos, a beach town right next to Porto. I worried a bit about the blisters and calluses that I had built up in Paris. A well-placed callus somewhere in your left thumb really helps you pluck those thick cello strings. A week without practicing, and your fingertips become as tender as the rear end of a baboon.

Baboon >> buffoon.

I went to a hardware store in Matosinhos, a couple of blocks from the AirBnb I had rented with my wife Alexis. Two ladies worked there, mother and adult daughter. I explained my predicament to the daughter.

“I’m a cellist, I’m preparing to record a CD in which I have to pluck the strings, and I need to build up some calluses. Do you have some bit of wire or something that resembles a string that I can pluck until I have a blister, and until the blister becomes a callus?”

“Let me think.” She went looking here and there, and she came back with a potato peeler. “Maybe you can caress the blade.” Sure, sure.

My wife was with me. She too had an idea. “How about sandpaper? You could rub sandpaper and build some resistance.”

I bought the peeler and a sheet of thick sandpaper. At the checkout, mother and daughter started expressing themselves. The daughter said, “Potatoes and carrots,” and air-peeled some. The mother said, “I only do potatoes. I’m left-handed.” I was certain that, as a child in conservative Portugal, she had been forced to write with her right hand, the left tied behind her back. I asked her about it, and she confirmed it. “I write with the right hand, but I can also write with the left.” I asked her to show me, by writing “Pedro de Alcantara” down on her notepad, with the right and the left hands in turn. She got into it. Both versions were legible. I asked her, “When you’re mad with your daughter, do you slap her with the right or with the left hand?” “The left, of course,” she said, laughing.

At home I rubbed my left thumb on the sandpaper. Soon it became red and raw, like a wound. My worry about the recording went up a notch. “Maybe the wound will be better by the time of the recording,” my wife said, her voice melding hope and apprehension.

 Baboon >> good afternoon >> go home soon.

The hardware store, the mother and daughter, my wife’s devotion, my workshop in Porto, the daily round of beach walks and city explorations in Matosinhos, the fresh foods; Katharine Rawdon’s talent and friendship, our shared love of music, our Paris rehearsals, our laughing together: the recording went extremely well.

The process is a learning, and the learning is a healing. Uncertainty and risk-taking, preparation and humor, pacing and rhythm, trust and faith, sandpaper and potato peeler. Take the lead helmet off and you’ll solve all your problems.

©2023, Pedro de Alcantara

Yay!

Our lives are made of intertwined rituals. We’re naturally sensitive to very big rituals: weddings, baptisms, anniversaries, and funerals—rituals that, ultimately, involve the great themes of life, love, and death. It doesn’t matter if the last wedding that you attended was the most boring event in history; it’s still a ritual, signaling life and love. Other rituals might have a smaller impact in our existences, but they’re rituals nevertheless: rituals of greeting, of saying hello and goodbye; rituals of feeding and being fed; rituals of preparing for a trip, of leaving the house and going to the airport, of passing through passport control and arriving safely in a foreign land, yay!

Immanuel Davis, threshold guardian, welcoming me at the Minneapolis / St. Paul airport.

I like extending the alertness of ritual to the whole day, to every activity however small. I think of brushing my teeth as a ritual of cleansing, for instance. A cup of coffee is charged with echoes of Ethiopia and Colombia, and points in between. Your cup “holds the world and the history of the world,” as it were. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to appreciate the value and interest of coffee beyond the sensorial pleasures it affords you. Opening your computer is a ritual, whether it comes with eagerness or dread; sending and receiving emails and messages is mind-blowing, and worthy of the respect we grant other rituals. From smoke signals to emails in just a few thousand years, yay!

The agenda and the calendar are your friends when you want to heighten your sense of ritual. Many days are important in some way; there are weeks that leave a mark, there are months and years—for instance, the year of pandemic and confinement. I took notice of the day when I first thought of writing a piano method, titled Creative Health for Pianists: Concepts, Exercises & Compositions. It was Saturday, May 13, 2017. You can read about it here.

The method grew slowly and organically over the years. I had bouts of impatience, frustration, and discouragement, of course; but these didn’t prevent the method from going ever forward. Things, objects, events, ideas, and people all contribute to the ritualistic unfolding of your life. The method had its own needs and wants, its impetus, its destiny; “it” (the method) imposed its rituals on me: rituals of intuition, improvisation, composition, trial and error; also, rituals of revision and edition, of dropping some ideas, of deleting whole compositions, rituals of embracing and of letting go. The method and I have a very elaborate ritualistic back-and-forth going on, yay!

The method hit a sort of bump a couple of years ago, when an anonymous reader contracted by my editor to judge the project delivered a negative review. I took some time off the project to process the situation. Then I developed some new materials and reworked the text, and I re-submitted it to my editor. I decided to ritualize the new submission. I chose the date of May 13, 2022 to send my materials off: the fifth anniversary of the day I started writing the method. My piano teacher and dear friend Alexandre Mion told me that May 13 is an important date in religious circles. The first apparition of the Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal happened on May 13, 1917. Pope John Paul II was shot and wounded by Mehmet Ali Ağca on May 13, 1981. Believers are certain that the Virgin Mary protected the pope and caused the bullet to miss his vital organs, ensuring his survival.

I’m not religious; I’m just imaginative and playful. I loved hearing about the coincidences regarding May 13, yay! In truth, any one date will coincide with many historical events, and if my book had been conceived on May 12 or May 14 I’m sure I’d find other coincidences to get excited about.

In the morning of Friday, May 13, 2022 I went to the Louvre, chose a painting depicting the Virgin Mary, and sketched her face—you know, as a kind of homage or offering. I went back home, and at thirteen hundred hours and thirteen minutes and thirteen seconds on Friday, May 13 (13:13:13) I pressed the button emailing my updated submission to my editor. He replied a few hours later, announcing that all was good and we were going ahead with the production of the book. Yay!

After final acceptance by my editor, the piano method entered production, a slow and demanding process lasting a year. When production progressed, I asked my editing team if they could ritualize the date of publication for me, and schedule it either for May 13, 2023 (the sixth anniversary of method’s birth) or May 31, 2023 (someone’s birthday). Silly, I know! Silly is good; silly is meaningful; silly is helpful. My team reasonably said that a book’s actual publication depends on many variables, some of which are out of anyone’s control. But they did what they could. When the time of publication approached, amazon.com and amazon.co.uk had different launch dates, but amazon.co.uk said May 31st. Yay!

Click on the image if curious!

During my visit to Minneapolis last week, my wife (who was in Paris by herself) took delivery of a huge and heavy box: my author’s advance copies. Yay! I arrived back home on Sunday, May 28. And although I could simply have opened the big box and enjoyed looking at my baby, I decided to wait until my birthday to do it. It’s a “ritualistic sacrifice,” as it were: postponing the pleasure of immediate satisfaction to the greater pleasure of doing something ritualized on a momentous date. Yay!

The symbolic dimensions of things and events occur in the subjective realm of perception, imagination, and curiosity. We play with it, and we take it seriously; the more we play, the more serious we get.

Happy Birth, you big fat little piano method, 421 pages, 2.06 pounds, 934 grams! Thanks for entering my life, pestering me every day all day long, and bringing me so many gifts!

Victory!

Every victory counts. The size of the victory is immaterial. And the measurement of each victory is at any rate relative. What seems tiny to you can appear gigantic to someone else, and vice versa.

The little girl learned to tie her shoes. Victory! She spent time and effort acquiring the skill, she had many thoughts and emotions, she was sometimes frustrated and upset, and one day she did it! And she felt so good about it! I mean, she felt good about herself doing it. For her, it’s a big deal.

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

Don’t take your victories for granted.

To quit smoking is a victory; to cut your habitual smoking in half is a victory; to refrain from one cigarette is a victory. It doesn’t matter if you smoke 999 cigarettes in a given period rather than 1000 cigarettes. Every victory counts: it’s an absolute principle. You had to “work on yourself” in order not to smoke that one cigarette. You had to make choices and decisions against a lifelong habit. You did something that took you out of your comfort zone. You took a step forward. Victory!

People are very different one from the other. What you find difficult, I find easy; what you find easy, I find difficulty; my victories are unlikely to be the same as yours. It’s silly to think that other people are just like you. God forbid! And not because you’re an idiot, only because you’re different from me and I, from you. Criteria to define idiocy varies tremendously from culture to culture, and from person to person. Science hasn’t settled this issue yet, but there’s a professor at Harvard researching the theme with a well-designed double-blind experiment. He’ll have to wait until his paper gets peer-reviewed before he declares Victory!

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

A very shy person orders an omelet at a bistro in Paris. Victoire ! (The French put a space between the word and the exclamation mark.) It takes courage for the shy to be seen and to be heard. And it takes courage for the loudmouth to shut up. Victory! “Don’t be so shy. It’s just an omelet.” If that’s how you approach a shy person, you don’t know what it is like to be really shy—or, more broadly, what it is like to be someone else. It’s a great victory to become a bit more observant, a bit more sympathetic, a little less judgmental. The loudmouth has his reasons, much as we have ours. Let’s call him “exuberant” instead of “loudmouth.” Victory! I mean, the victory of changing your mind and your vocabulary. Here’s your homework: learn as many synonyms and euphemisms as possible for the word “idiot.” Skip the antonyms.

The contrary of victory is usually called “defeat.” But let’s ignore the scientific consensus and re-name it “I’m human” instead. You ate an extra cookie, you called someone an idiot, you forgot to pick up the kid at the kindergarten, you ate another extra cookie, and you called someone else an idiot. These aren’t defeats, but events punctuating your life as a human being. Tomorrow you’ll only eat one extra cookie and you’ll only call one person an idiot, and you’ll be right to declare Victory! Omigod, the kid at the kindergarten! If you hurry you’ll be only ten minutes late. Victory! Yes, being ten minutes late picking up your kid is a huge victory compared with not showing up. Every victory counts, every single victory; all victories are measured in relative terms; all victories are personal and subjective.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I’m partial to soft-baked dark-chocolate cookies, buttery salty chunky. Here in Paris, the French have perfected the art and have created victorious treats of which they are justifiably proud. At the time of writing this blog post (sitting at a café, of course) I haven’t eaten a cookie in, like, a week. Victory! . . . because the cookies and their brethren have given me inner foie gras, and lately I’ve been attempting to delay my rendez-vous with the fellows at the abattoir.

Acquiring skills, solving problems, changing habits, learning to apologize, learning not to apologize too much, refraining from an action, engaging in an action, saying yes, saying no, saying maybe: life in its entirety is a sort of chessboard where you play the endless game of “I’m human” and “Victory!” At the last move of the last round of the last match you’ll either enter “I’m human for all eternity” or “Victory for all eternity!” It’ll depend on the number of cookies you’ll have eaten. Warning: there’s such a thing as “not having eaten enough cookies in your life.” Every Harvard professor is currently testing how many are not enough and how many are too many.

Believe it or not, I wrote this post after attending a concert by The Country Rejects at the Salle Pleyel in central Paris. This is the inspiring program that they performed:

  1. (Sweet) Jesus Is My Cookie

  2. Chunkie Junkie

  3. Don’t Expel Me from the Harvard of Your Heart

  4. I’m Double-Blind With Love

  5. My Mother-in-Law Is Human (Know What I Mean?)

  6. She Called Me an Euphemism (for “Idiot”)

  7. Kiss My Difference

  8. On the Trottoir to the Abattoir

  9. I Smoked My Last Cigarette (Again)

  10. Victory Is a Four-Letter Word

Image by ErikaWittlieb from Pixabay

©2023, Pedro de Alcantara

The Portal

You can be alert and adaptable, to a varying degree; or confused and disconnected, also to a varying degree. Very alert and adaptable is desirable but not easy to achieve. Very confused and disconnected is problematic, don’t you think? So we all look for ways of going toward the desirable state, which is called by many names: embodied mindfulness, integration, happy-healthy, and I’m Okay Thanks, among others.

The journey isn’t linear. You can’t just take five little steps with no effort, and voilà! We humans are full of contradictory impulses, conflicting needs and wants, harsh circumstances, unconscious habits, tics, parasites, microbes, fauna and flora. Plus in-laws.

And yet, for millennia people have traveled the road to integration, and sometimes successfully. Many paths have been trod: prayer, ritual, sacrifice, discipline; concentrate on your breath, concentrate on your posture, concentrate on a sacred word. Procedures may include pilgrimage, reading, chanting, joining a group, leaving a group, waking up early, eating certain foods, dieting, fasting, drinking, not drinking . . . the list is long and fascinating, from Abstinence to Zen.

I believe that the passage from confused to alert can happen through any portal. You haven’t seen a friend of yours for a couple of years, and when you meet her again you sense she has changed in ways you can’t pinpoint. “You look different.” “Thanks for noticing. I took up ballroom dancing.” What is interesting is that she didn’t simply learn ballroom dancing; she worked on herself; she faced some of her longstanding fears about movement and sensuality; she reached out to other people and to the wider world; she learned a repertory of songs and dances; she became skillful at keeping a steady practice, going to dance several times a week; she passed from the private sphere of her home and her head to the public sphere of give-and-take in front of others; she traveled to Argentina for a tango workshop, and to Cuba for a salsa workshop. Her passport got stamped, if you know what I mean.

Artwork by Saul Steinberg, via the Saul Steinberg Foundation.

“You look different.” “Thanks for noticing. I’m learning puppetry.”

“You look different.” “Thanks for noticing. You won’t believe this, but I took up ping-pong.”

Any portal will do it, though different people prefer different portals. In the Japanese Zen tradition, for instance, portals have included archery, flower arrangement, the tea ceremony, and calligraphy. And sitting. Sitting will take you there. Ordinary life is full of portals that sometimes go unnoticed. To sort the laundry isn’t to sort the laundry; it is to work on yourself as you sort the laundry, discerning patterns, sensing textures and seeing colors, organizing objects, organizing your home, organizing your mind to accomplish a needed task, thinking about your children, having a million sensations and a billion emotions. Every sock tells a story. “My Hole, My Self.”

Hey, I said it already: people are full of contradictions. Becoming good at sorting the laundry won’t necessarily turn you into a model human being. We know that Zen masters can be irascible and unreasonable, that great painters can be suicidal drunks, that martial artists can be sadists who inflict pain on others for no good reason, that saints poop. “Perfection isn’t a human attribute; humanness is.” In life you’ll change and grow to the extent that you can. Existential change isn’t measurable. Working on yourself is a journey, not a destination. Poop like a saint.

My piano method will be published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in a few months. I think of it as a portal for you to work on yourself and become less confused and more alert, about the piano and music but also about yourself. You don’t need to be “good” in order to play the piano. You don’t need talent, previous experience, or anything at all; you just need to pass through the portal. It takes “willingness,” which in itself merits a whole blog post or encyclopedia since it’s the one requirement without which your passport won’t get stamped, if you know what I mean.

My portal is multidimensional. Ten chapters, plus introductory and concluding materials. Mysteriously wonderful little exercises that sound good and feel good to the fingers, hands, minds, hearts, and cosmogonies. Compositions, some four bars long, others seven pages long. Supporting video clips. Anecdotes, explanations, encouragement, attractive photos of children being children. There’s a photo of a baby goat, jumping. Wow, it’s one incredible adorable goat. My compositions have built-in space for you to think, sense, breathe, and decide how you’re going to play something, how you’re going to work on yourself, how you’re going to grow and change. Yes, every chapter starts easy, although chapter seven, for instance, is more elaborate and demanding than chapter one. Strange as it may seem, the method is suited to complete beginners and to concert pianists. The jumping goat is everyone’s friend.

Change-and-growth self-report: The six years during which I’ve worked on my piano method have been wonderful. My piano teacher and adoptive brother Alexandre Mion is wonderful. The production team at OUP is wonderful. The rehearsal studios that I frequent in Paris are wonderful. Walking from my home to the Studio Bleu 40 minutes away is wonderful. My students are wonderful. Receiving musical insights from unfathomable sources is wonderful. I’m still irascible and unreasonable, but there are days when I feel like a saint. It’s wonderful.

 

 

Zit visits the museum

The here, now is a first-person, singular experience. This is a stereotypical Zen-like statement, either completely pretentious or quite powerful according to how you read it, or how you like to read it.

First-person, singular is like this: “I, Pedro, am sitting at a café in Paris, watching and listening to the happy crowd having Sunday brunch. I, Pedro, had a tasty coffee, and I, Pedro, am now drafting a blog post.”

Second-person, singular is like this: “You, reader, should take a shower sooner rather than later.”

Third-person, singular is like this: “She left me, the odious witch.”

First-person, plural is like this: “We cooked dinner. We burned the house down.”

Second-person, plural is like this: “You all should take a shower, all of you, without exception, all of you.”

Third-person, plural is like this: “They left me, the odious witches.”

I think that it’s important to know the difference between these persons or perspectives, and to know when you’re having a first-person, singular experience with its wealth of sensations and emotions, and when you’re leaking out of first-person and trying to be in the mind or body or heart or soul of someone else. “You, reader, should see a shrink.” It doesn’t sound right, does it?

I can have my first-person, singular experience of the world: Paris, café, piano, cello, breakfast, dinner, my own thoughts and feelings, my own sensations, my own agency—which I’ll define as “making choices and decisions on my own behalf according to my own goals, short-term and long-term.”

Or I can experience the world by proxy: someone sitting not far from me is having a croissant with his coffee, and in my imagination I start tasting that croissant, chewing it, swallowing it, loving it by proxy because it’s someone else’s experience and sensation but I try to make it my own. Eat a croissant by proxy: weight-loss strategy.

Five hundred years ago, a great painter (who happened to be a white male, but I think this isn’t too important) had a first-person, singular experience while in the presence of a woman (also white, but it’s just a detail). It’s not possible for us to know exactly how the painter was feeling, but we can suppose that he was, indeed, having thoughts, sensations, and emotions of many types, reacting to the woman, to the environment in which they were together, to the entire sociocultural context in which the man and the woman lived.

The man and the woman engaged in a deeply meaningful give-and-take. Every time the man took a breath he’d capture some molecules emanating from the woman, and vice versa. He saw the woman, he heard her, he talked to her. And she saw him, heard him, talked to him. A real molecule dialogue, in real time, analogical. Carl Jung would say—wouldn’t he?—that the man was meeting his anima, and the woman meeting her animus. In other words, an archetypal experience of infinite power. Having sex isn’t necessary for this archetypal encounter, and it’s extremely unlikely that Leonardo da Vinci had sex with Lisa del Giocondo.

But he did paint her, creating a record of their two-sided first-person, singular archetypal encounter (“ihre zweiseitige, singuläre archetypische Begegnung in der Ich-Perspektive”). You’re familiar with the painting, now called “Mona Lisa” and hanging in the Louvre in Paris.

The painting traveled in time and space, and it accrued (or gathered) tremendous historical power. It’d be easy to hyperlink from the Mona Lisa to just about any event in European history: Renaissance, Napoleon, monarchy, empire, republic, the French, the Italians, nobility, war and peace. Or any event in art history. Or anything, anywhere.

Never mind history, anything, anywhere. I’m in the Louvre, in relative proximity to the painting. The painting is protected by glass, and I can’t get any nearer to it than about two meters or so. And I’m surrounded by dozens and hundreds and thousands of tourists from every corner of the world, all of them having waited in a crowded line to stand for fifteen seconds two meters away from a painting protected by glass, and all of them taking selfies with their smartphones. And I too will take a selfie, standing in the crowd; and I’ll publish the photo on Instagram; and I’ll take a screenshot of my Instagram and publish it here.

And you’ll look at a reproduction of a snapshot of an Instagram feed featuring someone else’s selfie near a glass-protected painting that is the record of a long-ago archetypal meeting between anima and animus.

Proxy, proxy, proxy, proxy, proxy to the nth power.

The experience of belonging to a crowd of smart-phonies is its own thing, its own archetypal experience. But it seems useful to make a distinction between that experience and the other: the two-sided first-person, singular & plural meeting of archetypal energies. I, Pedro, met a woman. We talked. Molecules came and went, molecules intertwined. The experience transformed me, “on a molecular level.” I, Pedro, went to the Louvre on a lark, just to do the thing that thousands and millions of tourists do, have done, and will continue to do. Miserable little pixel. Ant in the anthill. Bit, dot, ant, nit, wot, zit.

I, Pedro, take a deep breath and I write a sober, intelligent seven-item list. Very helpful, you-Pedro!

1. Learn your persons. First, second, third, singular and plural. Each offers you a perspective, a filter, a view, a possibility.

2. Monitor how you pass in and out of first-person singular. All persons are vitally useful in your life, but their usefulness suffers if you don’t know where you are, person-wise.

3. “By proxy” means not your own lived experience. It has its merits, too; movies and novels allow you to have terrific adventures by proxy.

4. But if you’re looking for deeply meaningful lived experiences, first-person singular is more or less obligatory. Two-sided first-person singular experience becomes first-person, plural. Obviously.

5. Not every wot and zit yielding a smartphone is a smart-phony. There are plenty of dumb-phonies out there.

6. Wouldn’t it be terrible if a supposed seven-item list only had SIX items?

6b. Or EIGHT. Geez.