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 other day I spent an hour and a half inside the Châtelet-Les Halles metro station in central Paris. Wikipedia tells me that it’s the world’s largest public-transport station. Five metro lines and three suburban express lines converge there, and 750.000 people pass through it every day—roughly four times the traffic of Times Square subway station in New York City.

The entire thing is undergoing repairs right now. Tarpaulin, exposed wires on ceilings and walls; cement and dust everywhere; missing signage; a few corridors or walkways blocked altogether.

In brief, Châtelet-Les Halles is a huge, busy, noisy, crowded place; a complex environment, difficult, threatening, suffocating.

As it turns out, it’s also wonderful and fascinating.

I had several purposes in mind when I went there. I wanted to see if I could navigate it without losing myself. I wanted to see if I could stay calm and focused while hundreds of people swarmed past me. I wanted to see if I could make time for myself when the environment seemed to indicate that time had run out. I wanted to see if I could change my reactions to what, in the past, I had considered a hopelessly disagreeable situation.

The world is made of information, and your life consists in what information you decide to pay attention to and how you interpret it. A passerby smiles at you out in the street; that’s information. Is the smile friendly, sarcastic, judgmental, molesting, meaningful, meaningless? You have to notice the smile first, then interpret it, then choose how to react to it. This play between information and interpretation goes on uninterrupted in everyone’s lives.

Châtelet-Les Halles contains a tremendous amount of information. To enter the station is to become an interpreter of a particular informational universe. Some of the information is sonic: the sounds of trains arriving and departing, of escalators whirring and squeaking, of announcements over loudspeakers, of people talking, cursing, or shouting in a hundred languages, of buskers playing and singing.

Some of the information is olfactory: cement and dust, hints of perfume or tobacco propagating from the clothes and the hair of people standing an inch away from you. There’s spatial information, visual information, numerical information, you name it.

Some of the information is graphic: maps, signs, arrows, numbered exits. In a place like Châtelet-Les Halles, these graphic signs are supremely important. No one would be able to enter and exit the station safely without the maps and arrows. There exists a whole art and science of graphic information display, called infographics. Wikipedia has an extensive, well-written page about it, full of links to other useful pages.

One of my purposes visiting the station was to suss out its infographics. Do the maps and signs help? Is the information clearly laid out? Can I actually understand it all and find my way from line 7 to RER B? Now that the station is being redone, its infographics too are changing. It’s interesting to detect the efforts the engineers and architects are making to help people navigate the station.

You can conceive of Châtelet-Les Halles as a single, enormous station; or as two separate, interlinked stations ("Châtelet" and "Les Halles"); or as three separate stations. It makes a difference as to how you respond to it. A single, enormous station: a threat. Three interlinked stations: nifty! And it makes a difference as to how you conceptualize and visualize it all.

Here is the ghost of the station, seen underneath the city. It allows you to place the various metro lines in geographical context. And it allows you to imagine how big the thing is. Then your imagination can decide: big and terrible, or big and wonderful!

This one here is engineering-oriented. It'll delight boys and confuse old ladies. It happens to be out-of-date; since it was drawn and published, a whole new metro line has been built (the fully automated 14, connecting Gare St Lazare to Olympiades).

This one is schematic, reducing the station to as little graphic information as possible. It's a friend to the analytical brain, who's likely to exclaim, "Ah-ha! I get it now! I love it!"

The three different sections of the station—or, if you wish, the three separate and interlinked stations—have received names and dedicated symbols: “secteur Seine, secteur Rivoli, secteur Forum.” These names are indicated everywhere throughout the station. Very, very helpful!

We’ll say that there are fifty corridors in the station, and twenty intersections between corridors (these are inexact numbers, just for the sake of argument). At corridor intersections, now there are new, huge signs indicating the line number and its destination. Very, very helpful!

The only thing is, it doesn’t matter how good the infographics are if you’re in an agitated psycho-physical state. Stressed out, confused, hypoglycemic, showing early signs of dementia, with a screaming child hanging from your neck, with a broken heel on your stiletto shoes, not a French speaker, impatient, drunk, illiterate? You won’t see the sign, and you if you see it you won’t be able to interpret it, and if you interpret it you won’t be able to act upon your interpretation. You’re lost, and you’ll stay lost.

I myself have had bouts of hypoglycemia in public spaces. I suddenly feel very hungry, my skull gets sweaty and cold, my arms and legs shake, and my mental acuity starts going down quickly. It happened to me at the main train station in Brussels a couple of years ago, for instance. In that state, I’m really not very intelligent.

And that was one of the ideas behind my visit to Châtelet-Les Halles: a sort of intelligence training. Let me go into a complicated environment, and let me deal with it—I mean, deal with myself in it, deal with my habits and tics, deal with my fragilities, my assumptions, my likes and dislikes, the risk of stress-induced hypoglycemia, the risk of “I want my mommy!’’

To traverse an unknown station with a specific, urgent task or appointment is “advanced.” I set my visit to Châtelet-Les Halles at “beginner,” even though I know the station well after 26 years in Paris. I gave myself unlimited time. I roamed freely, without worrying about entrances, exits, connections. (All counted, there are 19 exits.) I’d walk down a corridor, then just turn around and re-walk it. I’d look at a map and ponder the infographics. I’d stand at a corner, slightly removed from the crowd, and . . . just stand there, watching and listening. In a minute of watching, you'll see a living portrait of humanity: two hundred people rushing by, men and women and children of all shapes and nationalities.

If you decide to be in a place, your perception of the place changes considerably—if you really are in the "here, now" of that place, willingly, gladly. Noise becomes sound, and sound becomes music; what used to be an annoying, thick racket of indeterminate noise is now a sophisticated soundtrack to an intriguing movie. The confusing corridors become a mythical labyrinth, where Theseus is seeking to meet and destroy the Minotaur. Ariadne’s ball of thread will allow you to retrace your path and find your way back out of the maze. No, no; the whole station is the underworld, where Orpheus is searching for his Eurydice. Love shall prevail . . . unless Orpheus looks back too soon, then he'll lose Eurydice forever.

Deep inside Châtelet-Les Halles, I became Theseus, and I became Orpheus. This was the result of an interaction between the environment itself and my efforts at keeping my head about me within the environment.

Information, interpretation: the world is what you make of it.