La inexplicable completitud

December 9, 2024

(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.

The Dance

November 24, 2024

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!

Backstage Tour

November 6, 2024

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.”

Your mind is framed

September 25, 2024

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”).

Image from https://learnodo-newtonic.com/rene-descartes-contribution

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.

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

How long?

August 26, 2024

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.

A Country Called Story

July 25, 2024

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.

The Inevitable Self-Portrait

June 22, 2024

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.

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

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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.

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What can you learn from these birthday hallucinations?

Don’t take yourself too seriously.
People look at you, and without realizing it they create, in their minds, their own self-portrait “as you.”
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.
Highly developed art skills won’t save you from drawing inevitable self-portraits. “Remember Rembrandt.”
Gregory Peck probably didn’t take himself too seriously.
You don’t look like Gregory Peck.
Neither did Paul Newman.

Turning Point

May 21, 2024

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.

The Mystery

April 26, 2024

Mystery is just another name for superstition. I don’t understand how you, such an intelligent human being, can’t see that.
I wake up to Mystery and I spend my day in Mystery and I fall asleep to Mystery. Mystery is Beauty and Meaning.
Wait, aren’t you even going to try to define Mystery?
I fear Mystery. I can’t explain it.
It’s a well-known fact that there are four types of Mystery: existential, psychological, situational, and biological.
In Septuagint the word Mystery meant “secret counsel of God.” In Vulgate it was translated as sacramentum.
Oh yeah, I love a good Mystery. I’m always dying to find out who killed the stupid idiot.
I don’t understand the first thing about mathematics. It’s a Mystery.
Mystery is First and Last, Alpha and Omega, Yin and Yang, Heaven and Earth.
Take the Mystery out of it, and all the fun is gone.
Mystery gives, and Mystery takes away. We don’t know why, and we can’t know why.
There’s mystery, and then there’s Mystery. Don’t confuse the two.

Completely Crazy!

March 30, 2024

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.

Don't duck your responsibilities

February 27, 2024

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.

The menagerie

January 25, 2024

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.

To choose, or not to choose

December 30, 2023

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.

Practice is Meaning

November 27, 2023

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.

The Capital Joy

October 20, 2023

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.

My friend Brancusi

September 28, 2023

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.

The World

August 24, 2023

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.

A Year of Creativity

July 30, 2023

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.

Remain new inside.
Rhythm is everything.
Obey the inner impulse.
Intuition before skill.
Less ego, more flow.
Be alert to the context.
Displeasure exists.
Creativity leads, you follow.

Learning & Healing

June 27, 2023

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!”

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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.

Yay!

May 31, 2023

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!

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!