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.

Repeat after me!

December 28, 2021

Life is, oh so repetitive. How many breaths do we really take every day? Thousands. How many steps do we take? How many movements of jaw and tongue as we speak, argue, and exclaim? Thousands, thousands, thousands. Start thinking about it, and you’ll quickly conclude that it’s not possible to be alive if you don’t agree to a repetitive practice.

If you do any one thing twice, that counts as a repetition. Two or two thousand or two million, it’s all repetition. But two thousand times, with your mind focused on the action: wow. That is repetition! “To strive after, to attack, to rush, to fly!”

To do a thing many times: normal, banal, inevitable. To pay attention to a thing as you repeat it thousands of times: extraordinary. Attention is the mother of meaning. Your repetitive breath becomes meaningful when you pay attention to it. This isn’t free of risks, as you might become terribly self-conscious about ribs, throat, diaphragm, and—and oxygen. You’ll hyperventilate and pass out, guaranteed. Attention is the mother of dyspnea, hyperpnea, and oligopnea.

But I digress. Something doesn’t truly exist until you pay attention to it. And something truly exists when you pay attention to it. The something may be a fictional character, an abstract idea, or a voice in your head. It exists by occupying your psychic territory, and if you remain attentive to it over time, it’ll develop and grow. The monster becomes extremely strong if you think about him again-and-again-and-again. It doesn’t matter if the monster was born in the Maternity of Your Santa Cabeza. It’s a giant.

Repetitive practice creates monsters, for sure. But it also creates marvels.

You look at the face of your own child tens of thousands of times. You see the growing child differently from moment to moment, from year to year. The child is always changing, and so are you. On occasion, or often, or very often, you look without seeing. You may be “looking at your feelings” rather than “looking at the child.” But, all counted, you look at your child’s face for the equivalent of two full years, spread out over eight decades. Thirty thousand psychic snapshots, a repeated practice of unfathomable import (or, as Carl Jung used to say, “ein hellava Ting zu Du.”).

The average museum goer looks at a work of art for less than thirty seconds before moving on. How much information do you gather about something in thirty seconds flat, as opposed to two years spread out over eight decades? Look at the painting for longer; look at it more often; return to the museum or gallery and look at it in the morning and in the afternoon, before you eat and after you eat. The painting doesn’t behave the same when you’re hypoglycemic and when you’re over-caffeinated.

Go back, look again, go back, look again,

look for a while longer, look and stay looking.

An art gallery near my home had a show of paintings by Sean Scully, the great Irish-American artist. I visited it six times, staying between 25 and 40 minutes each time. There were about 18 paintings in the show. Let’s say three hours of visits all counted, 18 paintings, ten minutes per painting. “I looked Sean Scully in the eye. We didn’t blink.”

You don’t have to go to actual museums. You can look at any one thing, one beautiful thing in your home, again and again many times: a book, a rug, a piece of carpentry, the window giving out onto the garden. Or a wall of street art in your neighborhood.

I’m a big fan of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian poet, essayist, and short-story writer. I’ve been reading the same few short stories again and again—I mean, some of his stories I’ve now read thirty or forty times.

The information digs little pathways in your brain, and starts to influence your life and to change it. Symbolically if not biologically, the repeated information becomes embodied—that is, it becomes part of you. You look at a guy walking down the street, and you see his embodied information, the result of his repeated practice. This principle is easy to assess if you limit the observation to something like athletic activity: you see the guy’s biceps, and they bulge, do they ever. But the principle is operative across all fields of existence. The intellectual’s repetitive think-hard practice bulges, too! Does it ever!

Exact repetition of a gesture doesn’t happen often. Some aspect of the gesture is repeated, another aspect is varied. But in our system, this still counts as repetition. No two of my two thousand visits to the Place des Vosges were ever exactly alike, and some visits were remarkably different from the average visit. It doesn’t matter; variety is a fine component of repetitive practice.

Repetitive practice isn’t based on “I should do this,” but on “I want to do this.” Pleasure, integration, paradise. Repeat after me:

Pleasure, integration, paradise.

Pleasure, integration, paradise!

Rooted

June 28, 2021

The other day I tested a hypothesis: What is it like to plant myself in a fixed spot, and take as many photos as possible from that spot? The rules of the game are simple. Choose the spot. Plant your feet. Move any way you want, as long as you do not—do not!—move your feet. Twist your trunk, turn your head and neck 270 degrees, do the Pretzel, do the Möbius Strip, do the Camel’s Hump, the Crab, and the Wheelbarrow. Just don’t take a step, okay?

Screen Shot 2021-06-06 at 11.31.12 AM.jpg

Okay!

I went to the Place des Vosges and stood by one of the entrances on the northern side of the square. It was 10:30 in the morning on a sunny day. My plan was to stay rooted for 60 minutes, keeping the camera settings on automatic and without zooming in or out, everything fixed except for heart and brain (and upper body). I ended up taking 282 snapshots. Few qualify as good photographs. But, boy, was it fun!

My spot was liminal—a frontier or portal through which people entered and exited the Place des Vosges. I could see the Place and also the main street that runs along it, plus another street that runs into it at a 90-degree angle.

It’s pretty normal for a guy to just stand by the entrance of the Place and do nothing. This means that “nobody saw me” even though “I saw everyone.”

Children coming in with their minders. Visitors from various countries, talking animatedly in languages I didn’t speak. Harried workers rushing through, going from A to B with an obligation to perform or deliver. Joggers, some passing by my spot multiple times while I stood there.

I achieved a minor victory: For years I’ve been noticing a groundskeeper at the Place, gruff and disinclined to talk to you or even acknowledge your existence. While I stood at my spot he came around on one of his errands and he asked me, “Comment ça va?” That’s French for “How ya doin’?” He walked away quickly, having sensed that I could have hugged him.

I had a good line of sight of much of the Place, except for the narrow blind spot behind me which I couldn’t see however I turned and twisted. I could see the big trees in the middle of the square, which I’ve always called the Broccoli. I could see the sky, the pure unimpeded blueness faraway. Up close I could see the spiked ironworks that surround the square. Lamp posts and pigeons I could see, also many façades. I could stare at the sun.

I could see so much, and I could look at things really closely, and I could let me eyes linger and marvel at the beauty of it all.

Traffic was light on the street north of the Place des Vosges, but I saw trucks, pedestrians, cyclists, little kids in “locomotive contraptions,” to use a generic term for scooters and prams and suchlike.

A troupe of professionals came in to do a fashion photo shoot. It was a large team more than ten strong, everyone carrying walkie talkies (which the French call “talkie walkies”). After a while a friendly member from the troupe approached me. “You’re standing in the way of our shot,” he said. Oh the tragedy! I had been at my spot for 55 minutes, and ideally I’d stay another five, just for the sake of cosmogonics. But I took his hint and abandoned my spot. Truth be told, my right foot had fallen asleep and I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Back home I went.

Jean de la Fontaine, that fabulous fabulist, would have said it well, had he said it. “Enracine-toi sur place et tu verras le monde.” Root yourself to a spot, and you’ll see the World.