Don't duck your responsibilities

And then we quacked. And the quacking was good.

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

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

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

Conception, Perception, Intention, Action.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s why we quacked.

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

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

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

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

A Year of Creativity

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.

  1. Remain new inside.

  2. Rhythm is everything.

  3. Obey the inner impulse.

  4. Intuition before skill.

  5. Less ego, more flow.

  6. Be alert to the context.

  7. Displeasure exists.

  8. Creativity leads, you follow.

©2023, Pedro de Alcantara

The Portal

You can be alert and adaptable, to a varying degree; or confused and disconnected, also to a varying degree. Very alert and adaptable is desirable but not easy to achieve. Very confused and disconnected is problematic, don’t you think? So we all look for ways of going toward the desirable state, which is called by many names: embodied mindfulness, integration, happy-healthy, and I’m Okay Thanks, among others.

The journey isn’t linear. You can’t just take five little steps with no effort, and voilà! We humans are full of contradictory impulses, conflicting needs and wants, harsh circumstances, unconscious habits, tics, parasites, microbes, fauna and flora. Plus in-laws.

And yet, for millennia people have traveled the road to integration, and sometimes successfully. Many paths have been trod: prayer, ritual, sacrifice, discipline; concentrate on your breath, concentrate on your posture, concentrate on a sacred word. Procedures may include pilgrimage, reading, chanting, joining a group, leaving a group, waking up early, eating certain foods, dieting, fasting, drinking, not drinking . . . the list is long and fascinating, from Abstinence to Zen.

I believe that the passage from confused to alert can happen through any portal. You haven’t seen a friend of yours for a couple of years, and when you meet her again you sense she has changed in ways you can’t pinpoint. “You look different.” “Thanks for noticing. I took up ballroom dancing.” What is interesting is that she didn’t simply learn ballroom dancing; she worked on herself; she faced some of her longstanding fears about movement and sensuality; she reached out to other people and to the wider world; she learned a repertory of songs and dances; she became skillful at keeping a steady practice, going to dance several times a week; she passed from the private sphere of her home and her head to the public sphere of give-and-take in front of others; she traveled to Argentina for a tango workshop, and to Cuba for a salsa workshop. Her passport got stamped, if you know what I mean.

Artwork by Saul Steinberg, via the Saul Steinberg Foundation.

“You look different.” “Thanks for noticing. I’m learning puppetry.”

“You look different.” “Thanks for noticing. You won’t believe this, but I took up ping-pong.”

Any portal will do it, though different people prefer different portals. In the Japanese Zen tradition, for instance, portals have included archery, flower arrangement, the tea ceremony, and calligraphy. And sitting. Sitting will take you there. Ordinary life is full of portals that sometimes go unnoticed. To sort the laundry isn’t to sort the laundry; it is to work on yourself as you sort the laundry, discerning patterns, sensing textures and seeing colors, organizing objects, organizing your home, organizing your mind to accomplish a needed task, thinking about your children, having a million sensations and a billion emotions. Every sock tells a story. “My Hole, My Self.”

Hey, I said it already: people are full of contradictions. Becoming good at sorting the laundry won’t necessarily turn you into a model human being. We know that Zen masters can be irascible and unreasonable, that great painters can be suicidal drunks, that martial artists can be sadists who inflict pain on others for no good reason, that saints poop. “Perfection isn’t a human attribute; humanness is.” In life you’ll change and grow to the extent that you can. Existential change isn’t measurable. Working on yourself is a journey, not a destination. Poop like a saint.

My piano method will be published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in a few months. I think of it as a portal for you to work on yourself and become less confused and more alert, about the piano and music but also about yourself. You don’t need to be “good” in order to play the piano. You don’t need talent, previous experience, or anything at all; you just need to pass through the portal. It takes “willingness,” which in itself merits a whole blog post or encyclopedia since it’s the one requirement without which your passport won’t get stamped, if you know what I mean.

My portal is multidimensional. Ten chapters, plus introductory and concluding materials. Mysteriously wonderful little exercises that sound good and feel good to the fingers, hands, minds, hearts, and cosmogonies. Compositions, some four bars long, others seven pages long. Supporting video clips. Anecdotes, explanations, encouragement, attractive photos of children being children. There’s a photo of a baby goat, jumping. Wow, it’s one incredible adorable goat. My compositions have built-in space for you to think, sense, breathe, and decide how you’re going to play something, how you’re going to work on yourself, how you’re going to grow and change. Yes, every chapter starts easy, although chapter seven, for instance, is more elaborate and demanding than chapter one. Strange as it may seem, the method is suited to complete beginners and to concert pianists. The jumping goat is everyone’s friend.

Change-and-growth self-report: The six years during which I’ve worked on my piano method have been wonderful. My piano teacher and adoptive brother Alexandre Mion is wonderful. The production team at OUP is wonderful. The rehearsal studios that I frequent in Paris are wonderful. Walking from my home to the Studio Bleu 40 minutes away is wonderful. My students are wonderful. Receiving musical insights from unfathomable sources is wonderful. I’m still irascible and unreasonable, but there are days when I feel like a saint. It’s wonderful.

 

 

Swimming in the whole

The creative process is a totality. Some people might call it a whole world. Pretentious intellectuals like me like calling it a Gestalt, which is the same as a totality but the word has nice echoes, connotations, imaginings. You can take the Autobahn from Gestalt to Bauhaus.

When the totality doesn’t completely envelop your creative efforts, you’re likely to come up with crappy results. If, however, you dwell in the totality, results are, in themselves, secondary—and likely to be quite satisfying.

A young child digging a hole in a sandbox is immersed in the totality, and for this reason we find the child terribly lovable, worthy of veneration. The hole is secondary, but fascinating were you to analyze it. But let’s leave the hole aside and notice the totality. There’s the environment (a sandbox in a city park, late afternoon in summer); the materials of the creative work (bucket, scoop, sand); the commitment and investment of the young child in pursuing a goal (digging, digging, digging a hole); the psychomotor presence of the child, barefoot and in a deep squat (the animal living in space and time); the paradoxical mixture of “I’m just playing” and “This is serious business” (serious business); the silent stories that the child is telling herself and has been telling herself ever since she told herself her First Story (Indiana Jones); and the elemental, symbolic nature of the act (sand, sandbox, beach, desert, caravan, thirst, mirage, oasis, infinity, eternity). All of it is happening at the same time: it’s not a linear sequence (this, then that), but a kaleidoscopic amalgamation of all dimensions into a Gestalt (Autobahn).

It doesn’t matter in what domain you pursue the creative process: visual arts, music, writing, cooking, architecture, professional therapeutic work, politics, mathematics, brain surgery, TikTok. In the totality you shall find meaning, direction, and practical results. Not in the totality? Your brain-surgery patient will be “accidentally” lobotomized. By you, of course.

I recently added a domain to my creative pursuit: drawing with brush and ink. It’s a natural development within my drawing explorations, but it’s a new thing for me. If ever I did anything with brush and ink, it might have happened in seventh grade but I have no memory of it whatsoever. Therefore, it never happened! Ever, whatsoever, never!

It’s a new thing, I’m telling you.

There’s an art-supply store about five or seven minutes’ walk from my home. It’s packed, packed! with everything, everything! that I might want or need for an art project, art project! Sometimes I go there to buy nothing but a pencil—just to go there and to soak in its atmosphere and to dream of colors and shapes. I went in and chose an A2 sketchbook, on sale at 5 euros which is 5 dollars. 25 sheets of white paper, each sheet already an art work, practically by birth. A2 is the equivalent of four sheets of office paper: smaller than the Himalayas, but larger than a ladybug. I needed a brush. I have no experience with brushes, with using them, or with buying them. What kind, how big, how small, how expensive? I don’t know! The store has hundreds of brushes to choose from! Which one? I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know know know! And I picked one, medium sized, inexpensive: ultimately, it doesn’t matter which brush I get, because I’m just entering the maze and any portal will do. The main thing is to pass through and go in. Overthinking your choices can be nicht-Gestalt, so to speak.

I approached the manager to ask her about ink. French friendliness is different from American or Brazilian friendliness. The manager is somewhat serious, like a schoolteacher about to give you a grade lower than you expect. But I think it’s a façade: I bet she’s the archetypical schoolteacher who really cares for the kids in class, but who doesn’t externalize her caring because she risks crying with too much love. She’s direct and clear, businesslike. Showing her my brush, I said to her, “I don’t know what I want, I don’t know if you have it, and I don’t know where it’d be if you have it.” I mimicked sticking the brush into an invisible pot of ink, stirred it, and provided a slurpy splashy soundtrack. She understood me to perfection. She walked me to the corner of the store where the inks hid in plain sight, and she suggested an inexpensive pot of black ink appropriate for my learnings. I asked her, “Do I have the right to adore you?” She laughed briefly, then said, “Sure, I like it when people adore me.” I paid and left. Paper, brush, ink, and the help of a benevolent goddess in finding it all. Plus, a story that is meaningful to me and that will be forever associated with my brush-and-ink explorations.

Materials, discovery, pleasure, adoration. Territory, exploration, orientation, pleasure, joy. Adoration. Repeat yourself deliriously when you’re having a spiritual breakthrough: pleasure, joy, adoration.

Did you know that ink has a staining property? Blotch, splotch, fleck, speck, early death, crematorium. There’s no way I could blotch my wife, I mean, my home, my golden carpet, my babies, my cats, my cello, my piano, my heirlooms, or my wedding dress (some items on this list are fictional). I decided to go draw in my courtyard downstairs. I put on a pair of gym shorts and an old T-shirt, and barefoot to the courtyard I went.

My courtyard is a rectangle of perhaps 60 square meters. Low-slung apartment buildings on every side. Windows looking in. Four small olive trees in clay pots, though not producing olives. Two water taps, one of them with a hose attached, yes! And six or seven garbage cans in the standardized French format (here they’re called poubelles, and we use them for general waste but also for recycling paper and glass). I’ve lived in this building for 20 years, and I’ve entered and exited the courtyard thousands and thousands of times, each passage imprinting a little something in my memory, physical and emotional. I played concerts here during the pandemic confinement: short performances of my own music, for an audience of a few neighbors including two wonderful little kids.

I put two of the cleaner recycling garbage cans side by side and covered them with an old bedsheet. And this became a stable surface on which I could lay my sketchbook.

Neighbors come and go. There’s a subtle soundscape, mostly faint and distant: airplanes, city traffic, doors opening and closing, roadworks. The soundscape is caressing and agreeable: the city is alive, the buildings are alive, the neighbors are alive. Once I knew everything and everyone was alive, I started the physical, oh the very physical process of splotching and splecking. Brush into ink pot, brush onto page, gesture, movement: this is a drawing, this is art. It’s a dance, it’s Tai Chi, it’s air guitar, it’s shadow boxing, it’s squatting like a little child digging a hole. After I draw, I pull the page off the sketchbook and I lay it on the ground to dry. A work session might encompass 25 drawings, 25 dances.

Art is life is paradox. Nobody can define art, and nobody can encapsulate life. How hard am I thinking when I splotch a sheet of paper? It’s paradoxical, because my goal is and isn’t and isn’t and is to make art. My goal is discovery and pleasure. My goal is joy and adoration. My goal is to be barefoot in summer. My goal is to move as if not thinking, and yet my accumulated thoughts of 64 years are inevitably present when I move as if not thinking. I make gestural decisions. I test angles of contact. There’s speed, rhythm, and choreography. I’m clear and vague, I’m determined and flexible, I know a lot and I know very little: it’s all true. To the casual observer, it only takes me three seconds to do any one of my drawings. But that’s misleading. Each drawing takes me 64 years and three seconds.

The creative process is like a swimming pool or a pond or the ocean. I’m inside it; I’m enveloped by it, bathed by it. I float and I swim. The current takes me somewhere, and I follow along. Or, like a dolphin at play, I take the initiative and I jump out of the water and fall back into it again. The main thing, though, is to be in the water, totally; and not separate from it.

Last year I went to hear a famous violinist give a performance of classical music at one of the main Paris concert halls. Once he started playing, I quickly knew that I’d sit there waiting for the first half of the concert to be over, passing the time in frustration and resentment until I could rush back home during the intermission. The fellow wasn’t immersed in the totality; his playing was smooth and very, very professional. But . . . no. He wasn’t “total,” and the experience of watching him wasn’t “total-inducing.” Mine is a subjective perception, needlessly harsh, difficult to explain and to justify. Next time we meet, you and I will share subjective perceptions and harsh judgments, and we’ll do our best to justify them. Or maybe not. Justification is overrated.

We go to the movies and become irritated at something with high production values but no immersion in the creative totality. We start reading a book and sometimes we want to throw it out of the window, or we wish harm upon the writer, famous and accomplished as he and she may be. A painting can sell for millions of dollars and yet be creatively worthless. A gleaming new building goes up in a nice neighborhood, and we take one look at it and we see catastrophic waste, an urban-planning disaster, a moral failure. And we do our best not to dynamite the building.

Territory, materials, motivation, joy, pleasure, stories, paradoxes, symbols, metaphors. Adoration.

The other day I heard someone say, “Art is all about expression.” I didn’t dynamite the building, but I strongly disagreed! Mentally, in silence! “Art is all about connection,” I blasted telepathically.

“Oh, yeah? Connection to what?”

“Let’s go to the Place des Vosges. A little kid is digging a hole there.”

©2022, Pedro de Alcantara