Separation Anxiety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image by Fernando Costa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ©2025, Pedro de Alcantara

Good Luck!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2025, Pedro de Alcantara

Hallelujah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2025, Pedro de Alcantara

Krazy Kalendar

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

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

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

(by Ch. George P. Tee)

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

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

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

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

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

 ©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

La inexplicable completitud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara (texto y fotografías)

The Dance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

Backstage Tour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Receive an inkling

Sit with it for a while

Play with it, poke it with a long stick

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

Sketch it, and give yourself permission to be laughably incompetent

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

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

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

Publish and go hide

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

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

Your mind is framed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

How long?

How long does it take to peel a banana?

You think you know, don’t you!!!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How long does it take to peel a banana?

As long as it takes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bananagins Wake

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

A Country Called Story

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

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

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

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

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

It's overwhelming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

The Inevitable Self-Portrait

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

Everything is a Self-Portrait.

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

Point taken!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can you learn from these birthday hallucinations?

  1. Don’t take yourself too seriously.

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

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

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

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

  6. You don’t look like Gregory Peck.

  7. Neither did Paul Newman.

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

Turning Point

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The story doesn’t have a happy end.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

The Mystery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

Completely Crazy!

You read a book, for instance, assigned to you as schoolwork or as part of your Book Club. And inevitably you become the book’s co-author. You understand some bits but not others, you pay attention to some characters and events but you let your brain rush through borings passages, you identify with a secondary hero and you want to strangle one of her enemies. You analyze and digest the book, which becomes yours. Strangely and amazingly, the book that you’ve just read is completely different from the same book that your Book Club friends or schoolmates read. You can hardly believe it. How could they have missed so much of it? How could anyone not hate the ending? Are your friends completely crazy?

No, they simply co-write the book, “their book,” in their own way.

This process, which I’m going to call Transformative Projecting Subjectivity, is central to life. We co-write books and films by the way we respond to them. We interpret events. We respond to people, who become screens on which we project our own stories and likes and dislikes; and our projected stories “are” the people that we meet and interact with. We see the world with our own eyes, our little eyes, our big eyes, our irritable or distracted or keen or childlike or cynical eyes. And most of the time we aren’t alert to how we’re subjectively creating our individual world. We don’t know it, but we’re completely crazy.

Let’s go back to the imaginary book of our example. It exists as a material object, as a Manifestation of the Book Principle that unites every book written in history. It exists as part of a chain of imagination, creative effort, revision, editing, publishing, and distributing. It comes in multiple editions—paperback, hardcover, Kindle, audio, smoke signals. It might be translated into several languages. And it means something subjectively different to every reader who’s ever leafed through it, or studied it in depth; it also means something to the readers who have a faint inkling of what the book is about but who resolutely refuse to read it. The book is charged with every readerly emotion; the book is the recipient of every reader’s own story. The book is a shapeshifter, incessantly transformed by its encounter with each reader. Some books have had a long life, taking part in billions of encounters, which are billions of transformations and interpretations.

I asked Google to translate something into Persian for me: “I, book, am billions.” I’ll credit Rumi with the sentiment, although this is of course a lie. Rumi and Google have never met.

Books are just an example. We are the interpretive co-authors of all objects, all events, all situations, all words, all statements; through our perceptions and projections we’re co-creators of “everything, and everything else too.” Necessarily, we are the co-authors and co-creators of the people we meet; and other people, meeting us, create infinitely varied versions of us.

Human beings are complex and multilayered. The last simple human being was an amoeba who lived in Inner Gondwana five hundred million years ago. Since then, complexity has taken over. Contradiction, paradox, conflicting impulses and appetites; personalities that change from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde at the drop of a pacifier; strengths and weaknesses indistinguishable from each other . . . we’re Veritable Dagwood Sandwiches, splattering the world with our ketchup

 From my favorite site, www.etymonline.com:

In some of the earliest uses it’s described as an East Indian sauce made with fruits and spices, with spelling catchup. If this stated origin is correct, it might be from Tulu kajipu, meaning "curry" and said to derive from kaje, "to chew." Yet the word, usually spelled ketchup, is also described in early use as something resembling anchovies or soy sauce. It is said in modern sources to be from Malay (Austronesian) kichap, a fish sauce, possibly from Chinese koechiap "brine of fish," which, if correct, perhaps is from the Chinese community in northern Vietnam [Terrien de Lacouperie, in "Babylonian and Oriental Record," 1889, 1890].

But I digress. I’m trying to say that every person who’s ever met you has fabricated a version of you. It doesn’t matter if the “other” has met you in passing or closely, professionally or personally, at home or at school, in the back of a poorly lit, drafty, moldy church or in the lobby of a shopping mall in Inner Gondwana. The “other” has partly perceived and partly invented you, and you’ve done the same to the “other.” You might struggle to recognize this fabricated impression as “you,” but, but, BUT! yes, it’s “you” in some difficult-to-explain way. Someone finds you clever and attractive, and someone else finds you tiresome and ketchup-y. They’re both right!!!!! They’re your co-authors, writing and interpreting you; and for them, you definitely are this entity that they see, hear, smell, touch, and sometimes taste.

It seems useful, I’d say, to accept that you’re complex and multilayered, and that other people are also complex and multilayered, and that human interactions are Subjective Dialogues of Complexities with Elements of Perception, Fact, Projection, Imagination, Filter, Perspective, and Taste All Mixed Up. Try to convince the “other” that You’re Not What They Think You Are, and the “other” will then know for sure that you really are COMPLETELY CRAZY.

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

Don't duck your responsibilities

And then we quacked. And the quacking was good.

Recently I led one of my Musician@Work weekend sessions in Paris. Five participants, three of them professionally trained musicians, two very experienced amateurs, everyone talented, intelligent, alert, and friendly. And everyone human: full of contradictions and paradoxes, with the potential of becoming pretzels of twisty emotions.

On the surface, the work session was about making music. In reality, it was about being human, and about sharing our contradictions and paradoxes in the form of sounds made and sounds heard. You know: un-pretzeling ourselves, solving our contradictions and embracing our paradoxes.

Let’s use that old and useful tool, the four-element list. Today’s choice of words:

Conception, Perception, Intention, Action.

The act or action of making music, playing an instrument, singing, studying a score, performing in front of a friend or in front of a crowd of strangers seems to be the most important thing. It’s immediate and real; it’s happening right now; I’m playing, singing, talking, writing, I’m doing something; I act, therefore I am.

But the action is only a sort of outward manifestation, subject to forces and impulses that hide deeply behind the action itself.

Our minds carry dozens, hundreds, and thousands of concepts. We have our own definitions of what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, what is central and what is peripheral. Our manners, for instance: for some people it’s right and good to air-kiss the cheeks of friends, for other people it’s taboo, ugly, perverted, and criminal: it’s sexual harassment, and you know it! The air-kiss is a relatively banal example. Conception shapes our aesthetics, our careers, our family life, our lives. If you want to change your actions, you have no choice but to go dig into the conceptions that animate your actions.

Look at something for two seconds; look at it for two minutes; look at it for ten minutes: your perception of this one thing will change. Look at something when you’re hungry, look at it in the dark, look at it when your son is throwing a tantrum. Again, that one thing will be highly variable in your perception. Two people are standing next to each other, watching the sunset. They see two different suns, two different skies, two different marvels. Perception, in other words, is subjective and flexible. You might be sure, sure, SURE that your best friend has blue eyes, until one day you realize that her eyes are green. Years, decades, and you hadn’t actually seen her eyes.

Conception determines a lot about your perceptions. Conception is a database of right and wrong, good and bad, should and shouldn’t, believe and disbelieve. It means that you can hate or dismiss something even before you see or hear it. Conception might make you blind and deaf.

You play something for your friends, let’s say half a page of a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach. What is your intention? The possibilities are endless. To share, to give, to impose; to be liked by the friend, or to annoy the friend; to honor Bach (the deity of structure and knowledge) or to play with Bach (the deity of invention and pleasure); to make yourself seen and heard, or to disappear into the music itself; to bitterly obey a long-dead parent who insisted that you play when you didn’t want to, or to joyfully disobey the long-dead parent who really wanted you to be a doctor or engineer, not a barefoot musician without a retirement plan; to play beautifully or to play skillfully; to be good, to be better, to be best . . . there are so many possible intentions. And these intentions, in collaboration with your conceptions and perceptions, definitely and absolutely and visibly and audibly shape your actions.

That’s why we quacked.

Early in the workshop we tried to do a little exercise in which our conceptions, perceptions, and intentions conspired against us. It was simple: sing a drone; sustain, as a group, a single unchanging pitch. We were too serious, too tentative, too judgmental, too awkward, too concerned, too invested in doing something elevated, something good, something good! But us humans, with our wonderful contradictions and paradoxes, we can also decide to suddenly change our intentions and conceptions.

We carry, by birth, a feral dimension, spontaneous and free from judgment, a lively energy plentifully demonstrated by babies and children and screaming toddlers, by sports fanatics at a bar watching a match on a big TV screen, by clowns with no fear of ridicule. Simplifying it, we’re able to behave “primordially.” In Paris, after we caught ourselves being timid and critical of ourselves, we decided to become fowl and foul, and we performed, collectively and for our pleasure and delight, a sonata of quacks, a sextet of cock-a-doodles, a symphony of silliness. Our intention to be admirable good boys and girls was overwhelmed by the crescendo poco a poco sempre of screeches, squeaks, clucks, and cha-caws. Then we did a decrescendo poco a poco sempre of these bestial impulses, and we settled into a sweet and sonorous drone, and we took turns singing beautiful melismatic improvisations in tune with the drone. We had arrived at a new conception of good and bad, together with new perceptions and intentions. And we acted as never before.

The quacks had birthed Kyrie Eleison, and the rest of the weekend in Paris was divine.

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

The menagerie

I live near the Place des Vosges in central Paris. I’ve visited it more than three thousand times over the decades. It’s a big part of my daily life, my creative life, my married life, my life. History, architecture, nature, literature; birds, trees, branches, leaves, flowers, grass; fountains, water, weather, sky, rain, snow. And humans, many! Adults and children, visitors, groups of tourists, joggers; park workers, gardeners, cleaners; musicians, sometimes just practicing and occasionally busking. It’s a whole world.

We zoom in and we see a small child, maybe three years old, entering the park and rushing toward one of the four fountains, an adult rushing behind to make sure the child doesn’t drown. And we zoom in further, and we see the child’s face looking at the water spouting from the mouths of stone lions: sixteen lions arrayed symmetrically around a circle. In the child’s face, sheer wonderment, sheer delight.

The park is magic. The fountain is magic. The stone lion is magic. Water is magic. Everything is alive, beautiful, strange, sometimes threatening, often funny, and always meaningful. Children are unstoppably attracted to the fountain. But also to leaves on the ground, blades of grass, pigeons, sticks, pebbles, grains of sand.

Children are fantastically good at exploring and discovering, and also at playing, and also at teaching themselves how to play, how to dig holes, how to transport buckets of water from the fountain to the sandbox, how to walk and run, how to play ball, how to talk to other children be they friends or foes, how to get attention from their parents, how to evade their parents’ unwanted attention.

Warning! Here comes what appears to be a change in subject!

At home my wife and I keep a whole menagerie of stuffed toys. Molly the duck in a dress; Max the tiger; Maya the lioness; Nadia the cub, Enescu the baby elephant. Some people have children, others have pets; my wife and I limit ourselves to stuffed toys. Don’t you understand? They’re alive! They’re beautiful! They’re funny and meaningful! We tell ourselves stories triggered by Molly or Enescu (named after a great musician who’s a source of inspiration to me) or Nadia (Boulanger, or course). I received Molly as a gift when I taught a workshop in London several years ago. I was traveling with just a backpack, and after the workshop I headed straight to the Eurostar station. My backpack was too full to accommodate Molly, so I placed her inside my coat, her head sticking out and pushing gently against my throat and jaw, caressing me and helping me orient myself in space. Molly, a gift from Claire and Kamal; Molly, a memory from London; Molly, a traveling companion; Molly, a delightful embodiment of magic and wonderment; Molly, teaching me not to worry about what people will think when they see me wearing her in public, so to speak, as an adornment of my adult self.

Max the tiger is kinda floppy. He likes it when I grab him by the neck and get him to shake his head as if to drums that only he and I can hear. Maya the lioness is (1) extremely cute, (2) very expressive, and (3) soft and cuddly and fluffy and soft and cuddly. To touch her, to squeeze her, to press her against your face is to enhance your perception of the physical world, the world of sensations and gradations, of textures, forms and shapes, volumes, weight or the lack of weight. Squeezing a stuffed lion makes you sensitive and smart. And it makes you wanna cry a little from time to time.

By the fountain, I interviewed an imaginary child, a spokesperson for all children: “The lion is my friend. He talks to me. He’s called Leo Stinkybreath.” This is the child’s existence, and to lose touch with your own inner child is a loss with tragic consequences. All adults should have one or three or twelve stuffed toys in their homes and offices. Your birthday is coming up? Stuffed toy. You received a new book contract? Stuffed toy, celebration. Christmas? Stuffed toy. Lonely rainy Friday? Stuffed toy, tenderness, healing. You have no reason to go get a stuffed toy? That’s the very reason why you should go get one.

 ©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

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