First Times

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

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

Fünf Bananen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*”Du bist Bananen.”

©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

Three Lifestyles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not the same love, is it?

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

Ah, irresistible.

Freud image by Evgeny Parfenov.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a superpower.

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

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

How to become perfect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything is an intermediate step to something else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Perfection is the acceptance of imperfection.

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

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

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

Baby Drives a Stick Shift!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sigmund, sing your song!

“Das Ding muss nicht du sein,

und du musst nicht das Ding sein.”

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

  1. Your mind plays a role.

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

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

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

  5. Not every numbered list is useful.

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

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

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara