Enter the innermost circle

In Tibetan Buddhism, and in other practices, it’s said that contemplating a mandala can lead you toward enlightenment and integration.

Mandalas have become very popular. People use the word to mean different things, including “a pretty image with, like, some things resembling petals, and maybe a circle.” But the mandala that leads to enlightenment is of a specific sort. It’s extremely elaborate in the images, shapes, and colors it contains. It includes both a circle and a square inside it. And the square has four gates or portals, in the middle of each side of the square. The symbology is rich and meaningful.

The mandala is considered a representation of the Universe. Contemplating it becomes analogous to entering the Universe, passing through the four gates in the square that surrounds the circle, and becoming one with its center.

I’ve been developing an ambitious project titled “Power of Four.” It’s structured around the number 4 and its uses in creativity, problem-solving, intellectual and spiritual work, and so on. Researching my project, I pondered the mandala and its four-gated design, and I pondered the notion that you could become enlightened simply by contemplating an image.

This seemed far-fetched at first. An image? You stare at an image, and now you’re the Buddha?

But then I got thinking.

Imagine a photo of your mother as a child. The photo is framed, and it has sat on your bookshelf for twenty years. You might be very upset to come home one day and discover that the photo is missing. That’s because the photo encapsulates a wealth of thoughts, emotions, sensations, memories, yearnings, and stories. The photo “is” your mother, the photo “is” all mothers and motherhood, the photo “is” the passing of time, the generations, the eons. We might say that, like a mandala, this photo is a representation of the Universe. “It contains everything,” and if the photo goes missing, everything you cherish disappears.

Your mother as a child is only an illustration. Your brother as a child; you, as a child; a child. In principle, every image has the potential to become the informal mandala, to coin an expression: थे इन्फ़ोर्मल् मण्डल, as we say in the old country.

Feliz aniversário, Luis Eduardo!

A devout person keeps a painting with a religious theme on her wall. It could be the Madonna and child, for instance; or a man, crucified and bleeding; or the smiling Dalai Lama. The image tells a story, and both the image and story rearrange the mind, heart, and soul of the devout. Sin, punishment, and redemption; sacrifice and unconditional love; goodness, evil, and many other ideas “reside in the image,” although in truth these ideas “reside in the viewer’s heart” and the image triggers the thoughts, sensations, and emotions inside the viewer.

If you’re not devout, you might find it strange that someone venerates an icon such as a painting of the Virgin Mary—a painting that you consider gaudy and maybe even ridiculous. But suppose a drunk guest at one of your dinner parties goes up to that photo of your mother and spits on it. How would you feel? Deeply upset, incensed, enraged. Or paralyzed, in shock. It means that you have the same relationship with the photo that a devout person has with a traditional religious icon. The photo of your mother is, in fact, a religious icon. The phenomenon is non-denominational, so to speak.

Now imagine a photo of an ancestor, a political figure, or a spiritual leader whom you greatly respect. The photo “is” the leader, who “is” the set  of principles he or she espouses. You’d be afraid to misbehave in front of the photo, which would possibly come to life and admonish, mock, or punish you. You turn the photo around so that it faces the wall. Then the spiritual leader won’t see you, and you can do your thing in private.

A photograph can be so disturbing that a single short glance at it can traumatize you for a long time. Something unfathomable being done to a human being, a nine-year-old girl running naked and desperate from a napalm attack, from incomprehensible hellish fires. It’s so horrible that I won’t reproduce the image here.

Conversely, the contemplation of a photo of your own self as a child can help you on the way to forgiveness, acceptation, and love. It’s a big deal.

The power of images to affect us deeply is undeniable. It’s perfectly plausible that the sustained contemplation of an image of a certain type would lead you to enlightenment and integration.

Contemplating means really, really looking at it for a long time, with a certain frame of mind, absorbing every detail and receiving every message implied in every part of the image. It takes tremendous dedication to look at any one thing this way. As the song goes, “look with your heart.”

I’m not saying that you should become a Tibetan Buddhist. I’m only saying that images are powerful and very affecting. You might want to consider the images you look at and how you look at them. You might want not to look at certain images, and also not to share them with others. You might want to appreciate that different people find different images powerful and affecting. You might want to go out look at the world—look and really see, look and take it in, look and become the world.

There’s a tradition in which monks build a mandala with colored sand. It takes days to design and craft it, and the final result is remarkably beautiful. It’s the product of knowledge and wisdom, of team work, of skill and dedication, of devotion and discipline. Once the mandala is finished, the monks ritualistically destroy it, acknowledging that everything is impermanent in this life.

I found a short documentary about it, produced by the London-based Wellcome Collection. I downloaded it, muted the narration, edited the documentary into a shorter version with a new rhythm, and added one of my compositions as a soundtrack.

Turn the sound up. Impermanence is marvelous and terrifying.

The images are from a short documentary the Wellcome Collection produced about Tibetan sand mandalas, a Buddhist ritual that acknowledges impermanence. The m...

©2020, Pedro de Alcantara

Daffy does his laundry

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Hey, look at this. It’s a bunch of numbers, which appear meaningless. 

Inside it, there’s a nugget that interests us.

At the outset, the paragraph of numbers is data. 12155575700 is a little segment in a string of data.

It becomes a phone number if we display it like this: +1 (212) 555-5700. Data has become information.

In the conventions of phone-number display, the + means “a code used to access international dialing,” 1 means “the USA” and (212) means one of the area codes for New York City.  There’s only one place in the whole world to which this phone number is assigned, one home or one business, one precise person. Information has become knowledge.

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If you need this phone number, the information is valuable to you. And if it’s a beloved friend’s phone number, you invest it with emotion. The phone number becomes a symbol of your loving care, of a relationship going back twenty years and encompassing a lot of joys and sorrows. Knowledge has become wisdom.

We are always making the inevitable passage from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. It’s a vital passage, and it merits study. The secret to a successful passage lies in knowing how to do nothing—that is, knowing how not to jump inorganically from data to information, knowing how not to draw conclusions too soon, knowing to be in the presence of “seemingly provocative data” without in fact being provoked by it, and above all knowing the difference between data and information, and between knowledge and wisdom.

The amount of raw data available at our disposal is so great that we’ll call it infinite. And infinite is, like, an awful lot, a tremendous amount, much too much. It’s an established fact that mathematicians, metaphysicians, and philosophers who ponder infinity tend to go psychotic.

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We’ll say that information is an interpreted segment of data, or a combination of segments of data, juxtaposed and interpreted. And since you can segment and juxtapose date in infinite ways, the infinity of information is even greater than the infinity of data. Two guys looking at the same set of data will come up with different information. And two guys looking at the same information will walk away with different kinds of knowledge.

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It takes some effort of your intelligent alertness not to be overwhelmed by the infinite, by the tremendous, by the much-too-much.

You can put physical distance between you and data, and between you and information, for instance by not watching TV. I mean, really not watching TV. I mean, not turning it on, ever. I mean, altogether not having an idiot box in the house. Or you can put psychic distance between you and information. Suppose the TV is on. Enter a trance state where you don’t hear it, even though it’s blaring right in front of you.

It’s easier to turn it off. It’s easiest not to have a TV in the house.

In Icelandic, “idiot box” is hálfviti kassi. In Maori, pouaka poauau. And in English, idiot box.

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But I digress. Where was I? Oh. Yes, the washing machine. Overload your washing machine, and you’ll flood your downstairs neighbors. Now think of your mind as the washing machine, and your soul as the downstairs neighbors. It’s obvious—absolutely obvious!—that you must not overload your washing machine. And don’t make me explain it again, or it’ll defeat the purpose of this entire blog post.

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Your job, then, is to defend yourself against the onslaught and to curate your information: to decide what to approach and what to ignore, what to ponder and what to integrate. Take this blog post, for instance. You can probably ignore the digs about the idiot box. But you might want to learn some Maori, kairii noa koe i te pouaka panuku, koe! (“you idiot-box addict, you!”).

The Maoris define wisdom as te kaha ki te korero i tetahi hianga mai i tetahi Coke, or “the ability to tell a joke from a Coke.”

To their honored guests in their cozy homes, the Maoris serve wisdom ice-cold, with a glowing smile.

Ka taea e koe te tahae, e te tuakana! (*)

Looney Tunes Daffy Duck GIF from Looneytunes GIFs

©2020, Pedro de Alcantara

(*) You may burp, brother!

Let me count the ways

There are a thousand ways to hurt, and a thousand ways to heal.

It hurts to twist your ankle. You can heal it by resting, by going to a physiotherapist or an osteopath, by talking about your ankle and what it is like to be in pain. You can accelerate the healing by making jokes about your ankle and your hurt—that is, jokes about yourself. Recent studies have shown that laughing feels good. (These studies, however, are scientifically suspect as they were performed without a control group.)

The science on this is irrefutable.

It hurts to get a paper cut on your finger. It’s the typical “annoying” hurt. It distracts you from writing and typing and drawing and cooking and playing the piano. Even though it’s a tiny cut, practically invisible, it hurts nevertheless. Also, besides how annoying the cut is, you have to deal with how annoyed you are with yourself for having being inattentive and cutting yourself for no good reason. There’s a word in Yiddish for what you are when you cut your finger for no good reason: a nogoodreasonnik. And there’s another word in Yiddish for people who believe everything they’re told: a shmoo-moo-moo, colloquially referred to as a Moo-nik.

Jewish Wedding Jewish Dance GIF from Jewishwedding GIFs

It hurts to lose a lover. It’s not the same type and level of pain as a paper cut. It takes longer to heal, and the process is more elaborate. While lover-less, you can go to Healing School and learn about Hurting and Healing from friends, from family members, from movies and books and podcasts, and from the sunset. Strangely, the Yiddish word for sunset isn’t sunsetnik. Instead, it’s זונ - ונטערגאַנג (pronounced “zun - untergang”).

It hurts to be told that you have nothing to say, or that you have no voice, or that you really should think twice before opening your mouth again. It heals to speak, shout, sing, howl, and meow. Did you know that in Yiddish a cat is called a meownik?

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It hurts to be in an upside-down world of contagion and confinement. It hurts not to work and not to earn a living. It hurts not to travel, not to go outside, not to visit the street markets, not to rehearse and improvise with cherished colleagues. It hurts to find out that a friend is terribly ill, and to feel that you can’t do anything to help. It hurts not to know how things will turn out. Uncertainty quickly becomes a sort of certainty: Things will never be okay again. This certainty is very, very painful. Although it isn’t easy to achieve, it might heal (a little) to walk from the absoluteness of certainty and back to uncertainty, to its inherent flexibility, its untold possibilities:

In truth, I don’t know how things will turn out.

Everything has a negative and a positive charge. The positive charge of demagoguery, for instance, is our heightened conscience of the value of citizenship, of its rights and duties, and also its joys. The positive charge of confinement is reflection and meditation, among many other valuable actions. The positive charge of a worldwide catastrophe is solidarity, generosity, mutual support, the acknowledgement that we are in this together, we have always been together, and we’ll always be together. I mean, all of us: the parent and the child, the demagogue and the citizen, the nogoodreasonnik and the meownik, the sunrise and the sunset.

Don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget: there are a thousand ways to heal.

©2020, Pedro de Alcantara

A Talent for Becoming Talented

What is talent?

Warning! This is not an innocent question!

The answers you give to various types of questions hint at how you function in the world. Your answers reveal “who you are.”

Hundreds or perhaps thousands of opinions, theories, convictions, and suppositions—that is, hundreds or perhaps thousands of definitions and answers to questions—reside in your brain and heart, helping and hindering your life every day, all day long.

Your conception determines your practice. What you consider proper and good determines how you dress, how you present yourself in public, how you express yourself. If in your conception people shouldn’t talk too much or too loudly, quiet you will be, always and everywhere. And you won’t be able to change your voice or your speech patterns unless you change your deeply held conception of what’s right and what’s wrong in self-expression.

What is talent?

Let me make up an answer I don’t believe in, but that illustrates a certain conception and its inevitable practice. Talent is an innate facility for a psychomotor skill like playing the violin, or a more intellectual skill like mathematics or learning a foreign language. God-given or DNA-given, talent is immutable like your blood type: you’re born with it, and either you have it or you don’t. It’s lucky to be talented and unlucky to be untalented, because this governs how easy or how difficult your life will be.

“I didn’t play a musical instrument as a child, because I wasn’t talented. Everyone told me so.” “My only talent is for eating.” “So-and-so is a lot more talented than me.”

In my opinion, though, talent isn’t like your blood type, fixed and God-given. Talent isn’t a facility for the acquisition of skills. Talent isn’t a determinant in your life; talent isn’t fate.

I see talent as an availability or openness. To be talented is to be open to experiences and sensations, to intuitions and insights, to receiving information from multiple sources including ineffable ones like the collective unconscious, and to digesting the information you receive. If at the moment of the experience you’re available in body, mind, heart, and soul, then you learn from the experience. This can be the experience of watching a movie, the experience of attending a class or taking a lesson, the experience of holding a music instrument in your hands from the first time ever, the experience of meeting a stranger in a waiting line at the airport. You can learn super-fast if you’re available.

Once we define talent as being available to experience and sensation, we can develop it in multiple ways. Unlike your blood type, availability is changeable, in ways big and small. If you’re sleepy and grumpy, you’re less available than if you’re alert and cheerful. Ergo! If you’d like to become more talented, find ways of putting yourself in a good mood!

You can zero in on blockages to being available, and you can lessen or lift those blockages.

One blockage is the fear of ridicule. You can read about it here. Imagine two little kids, one who loves to laugh and be laughed at, and another who’s suffered a thousand humiliations in the hands of a severe parent. We know which kid will be available to experience and sensation, and which kid will be defensive and withdrawn. Given a safe environment and sympathetic teachers and friends, the second kid can become more available over time — that is, “more talented.”

3 yr old sings and plays la feria de las flores mariachi style

Another blockage is perfectionism. Perfectionism prevents you from being perfect! . . . that is, perfectly available to experience and sensation, which is the source of insight, accomplishment, and satisfaction. It isn’t easy to soften the hardened perfectionism of a hardened perfectionist, but it isn’t impossible either. Let’s throw the perfectionist into a cauldron of games, tricks, Zen koans, confusions, situations, jokes and suchlike, and let’s cook the fellow until he lowers his perfect standards and becomes tender and available and talented.

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The biggest of all blockages to the development of your talents, though, is to think that talent is a fixed quality rather than a malleable one. Re-define talent, and you’ll suddenly become able to become more talented.

For our left-brain friends, here’s a numbered list with — of course! — seven items.

1. Conception determines practice. If you want to improve any practical area of your life, work on the conception you hold in your cridhe-agus-eanchainn (that’s Scottish Gaelic for heart-and-brain).

2. Good mood. Doable! Chemicals: coffee, chocolate, small amounts of alcohol. Or walk in the park.

3. If anyone tells you that you aren’t talented, your responsibility is to be deaf to that person.

4. If anyone told you in the past that you weren’t talented, your responsibility is to be retroactively deaf to that person, whether s/he’s dead or alive.

5. Take one of my workshops, or take a lesson with me face-to-face or in cyberspace. You’ll become more talented in direct proportion to how much you pay me.

6. Although talent is malleable, the lack of a sense of humor is incurable.

7. Listen carefully to what I’m telling you!

©2020, Pedro de Alcantara 

I wouldn't do that if I were you

I dreamed I was at a nudist beach, crowded with men, women, and children, everyone naked and happy basking in the sun and playing in the water. I noticed that people were looking at me funny. A little boy pointed at me and, in an anguished voice, cried strange words in a language I didn’t understand. Suddenly, I realized that I was dressed, my shirt buttoned all the way up, my trousers professionally creased. Shoes! I was wearing expensive formal shoes that shone under the summer sun! I woke up in a sweat, feeling embarrassed and humiliated.

Okay, I confess: I’ve never had such a dream. But the other one—I’m naked in a normal setting—yes, very often, much too often! Before you start interpreting my dreams, though, let me tell you that this post isn’t about being naked or having dreams about it.

Photo by Pedro de Alcantara. This tree dwells in the Place des Vosges in central Paris.

It’s about the fear of ridicule.

And don’t you be ridiculous by denying that you personally don’t fear ridicule! You, of all people!

Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel ridiculous. I was just trying to make a point.

My point is that the fear of ridicule is an archetypal state or feeling—something that lurks within us and around us, and that manifests itself sooner or later, mildly or strongly; something that determines many of our behaviors, often without our being consciously aware of it; something permanently stressful and disagreeable, with the power to paralyze our thoughts, actions, opinions, and emotions; a threat.

The fear of ridicule is sufficiently established to receive a psychiatric diagnosis, complete with a label in an erudite foreign language: gelotophobia. This is from Wikipedia:

Gelotophobia is a fear of being laughed at, a type of social phobia. While most people do not like being laughed at, there is a sub-group of people that exceedingly fear it, and without obvious reasons, they relate laughter they hear to be directed at themselves. (…)

In his clinical observations, Dr. Michael Titze found that some of his patients seemed to be primarily worried about being laughed at. They tended to scan their environment for signs of laughter and ridicule. Furthermore, they reported that they had the impression of being ridiculous themselves. Additionally, Titze observed a specific movement pattern among them when they thought they were being laughed at—awkward, wooden movements that resembled those of wooden puppets. He described this state as "Pinocchio Syndrome."

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Let’s simplify it and say that the fear of ridicule is universal, but the manifestations of ridicule are particular—to a family, a group of people, a society, a culture, a place and a time. Today this shirt is the height of cool. Tomorrow it’s junk, and only a ridiculous numskull would wear it.

Every one thing has its potential for the ridiculous, depending on the filters and perspectives of the perpetrators and victims of ridicule.

Here’s a partial list of ridiculents, to coin a term: courtship, forms of greeting, poetry, ballet, opera, interior design, makeup, education, politics, and religion. Also: speech patterns, PhD theses, and hats. Also: anything on TV. Also: the customs and rituals of countries other than your own.

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Also: table manners, ceremony, etiquette, and protocol.

Moulay Hassan, Crown Prince of Morocco, hates having his hand kissed. He’s on to something.

The fear of ridicule can prevent you from speaking up, and from speaking altogether. It can prevent you from choosing the career that suits you most, if your family or social class deems your career choice ridiculous. It can prevent you from moving and breathing in your natural way, if you feel that you risk scorn, mockery, or any “special treatment.” It can prevent you from enjoying sex or from having sex. It can lead you to doubt yourself, judge yourself, and hate yourself. Happiness and health, the development of your talents and ambitions, the pleasures of daily life: the fear of ridicule threatens it all.

The Internet told me to tell you that the fear of ridicule is an urgent spiritual matter. This is from the Bible Hub:

The Fear of Ridicule

Psalm 1:1-6
Blessed is the man that walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners…

As the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of a fool, and he is a poor invertebrate creature who allows himself to be laughed down when he attempts to stick to his principles and tries to do what he believes to be right. "Learn from the earliest days," says Sydney Smith, "to insure your principles against the perils of ridicule; you can no more exercise your reason if you live in the constant dread of laughter, than you can enjoy your life if you are in constant terror of death. No coward is greater than he who dares not to be wise because fools will laugh at him.”

Okay, we need an anti-fear-of-ridicule procedure.

1. Acknowledge that the fear is a big deal, for you and for everyone else.

2. Acknowledge that expressions of ridicule are completely variable from culture to culture, and even from individual to individual.

3. Acknowledge that you can’t make the potential for ridicule to go away, but to some degree you can choose how you react to it.

4. Relax.

5. Don’t ridicule other people. Instead, help them overcome their fear of it. Make yourself ridiculous on purpose. It’s very healing!

Uploaded by Pedro de Alcantara on 2020-01-27.

With many of my students in private lessons and workshops, I offer myself as a sort of ridiculous shield. I’ll make fun of myself in every respect, and if I see that you’re beginning to have a good time, I’ll find friendly ways to help make fun of your own sweet and tender self. Sooner or later, your gelotophobia dissipates and you develop its sister condition: gelotophilia, or the joy of being laughed at. I’m not making this up!

The photos below are from a ridiculous workshop I gave at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow.

©2020, Pedro de Alcantara

Stay!

One of my talented and motivated students takes a lesson a year with me. The fellow lives abroad and comes to Paris for a few days at Christmas time. For our purposes, let’s call him Gerrit. We get along great, and our yearly encounters are meaningful to both of us. Gerrit gives me permission to be creative, to take risks, and to play, and I feel terribly grateful toward him.

This year Gerrit came into the lesson with a specific purpose in mind. He told me that in professional meetings as well as in social situations, he finds it difficult to express his views. He’s overwhelmed by other people’s forceful displays of opinion and sentiment, and he removes himself from discussion. Later, at home, he seethes with anger. At those people, of course! Who won’t listen to him, who shut him down, who push him out! And whose opinions are really quite so very stupid!

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I’ve long found it useful to relate seemingly disparate elements to a shared, core principle. For instance, many of our behaviors in life can be studied from the point of view of rhythm: the things we rush through, the things we let drag; the steady routines and the impulsive breaks from routine; the way we cook and the way we clean up after we cook; our manner of walking, of speaking, of shaking hands with strangers. Once we start thinking about it, we see that everything we do depends on our sense of rhythm. To work on your rhythms is to work on your health, your identity, your career, your family life, and a thousand other things. Good health is good rhythm.

Other principles that are all-encompassing include space, time, direction (where are you going?), discourse (the words you use and how you use them), food, ergonomics (the furniture and objects and shoes and cellos in your life) . . . the list goes on.

Hearing and watching Gerrit explain his problem, I decided that he was talking about his presence in space, which I consider a powerful all-encompassing principle for all of us. In meetings, Gerrit doesn’t find his space, he isn’t given his space, he doesn’t take the space he needs and wants. “He disappears.” I then created a number of spatial situations—games, really—for Gerrit to become keenly aware of himself-in-the-problem, so that he could become keenly attentive to himself-as-the-solution.

Gerrit is tall, or taller than me, or tall and striking to my eyes. I asked him to put his arms out and to the side, to open his wings like a condor. His span was gigantic, and my apartment was almost too small to accommodate him. I commented admiringly on his span, and Gerrit said, “It’s the sweater. It makes me look big.” The sweater may have make him look even bigger than his bodily self, but Gerrit was big and is big and will always be big. I pointed out to him that “he diminished himself” by his sweater remark. You are the size that you are, and you are also the size that you think and feel that you are. You communicate the mixture of these two sizes to other people. If you want to be seen and to be heard . . . well, you have to expand. And you have to be alert to your habitual ways of not expanding, the thoughts and feelings and words that you employ to diminish yourself. Here’s Gerrit the Condor. To protect his privacy, I decapitated him.

I keep a megaphone in my teaching room. I opened a window onto the street three floors below, handed Gerrit the megaphone, and asked him to shout at a passerby. He could hardly believe I was asking him to do such a thing, such a nasty thing, such a . . . such a perverted thing. He got all shy and giggly, and I had to persuade him gently and teasingly before he took the megaphone, went to the window, and said a quiet “Hey you” into it. I sensed that Gerrit believed that shouting at people was an angry thing to do. He was amalgamating two separate things: anger and loudness. I asked him to shout a loving “Hey you! Merry Christmas!” to a group of passersby. And, yay! Gerrit did it! The group looked up at us and waved, everybody smiley and happy. Not only do you have the right to speak; you have the right to speak loudly; you have the right to speak in anger if it comes to it; and you have the right to reach out to people and greet them in good cheer, as loud as an elephant in the savanna. Have an internal megaphone at your disposal, and use it as you see fit.

I suggested another game. “I’m going to talk nonstop, and you do it too, okay? We both talk nonstop, okay?” And I started talking nonstop. Gerrit stood there, looking dumbfounded and hurt. After talking alone for a little while, I had to stop and laugh. I pointed out that when confronted with a motormouth he fell silent, or “he went away and disappeared,” when in fact he could have stayed put and become a motormouth himself. We did this exercise again, and now Gerrit talked and talked in his mother tongue, which is foreign to me. We became the Cackling Duo of Beaumarchais. This exercise isn’t about listening to someone else talk, or to be listened to when you talk; it’s about making sounds, being willing to make sounds even if your listeners don’t pay attention, or pay attention but don’t understand you, or understand you but disagree with you. If you don’t make sounds to begin with, you’re cooked!

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I said, “I’m going to attack you by waving my hand at high speed close to your face.” If I keep my wrist floppy, the fast wave close to the face can be quite startling and annoying, even if I never touch your face. I went for it, and Gerrit’s first reaction was to move his head (but not his body) back and away from my hand, with a look of displeasure on his face. “He shrank.'“ He had other choices at his disposal: to remain big but to move away, to wave his own hand close to my face, to shout, to playact, to laugh. Gerrit is several inches taller than me. He could easily dominate and overcome me if only he wanted to. He finally sprung into action and held my wrist firmly, stopping the attack and solving the spatial problem I had created for him. The solution required agency: the willingness to take initiative, and above all the willingness to act against one’s habit.

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Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. (1 Peter 5:8)

Your habit is your adversary, the roaring lion. It’s forever attacking you, tripping you up, confusing you, getting you to think habitual thoughts and to behave in habitual behaviors and to feel habitual sensations and emotions. Habit plays dirty. It’ll do anything to prevail and to survive, sometimes disguising itself as Santa Claus. Embodied mindfulness is like a martial art. You have to defend yourself from the devouring habit—that is, to catch the habit before the habit catches you; to do nothing before you do something; to witness your own behaviors even as you engage in them, the better to exorcise them. It takes distance, agency, and cleverness to tame that devil.

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

©2020, Pedro de Alcantara

The Forking Path

In the summer of 2002, I moved to my current home in central Paris—a small rented apartment in a wonderful neighborhood, steps from the Bastille, street markets, movie theaters, and the Place des Vosges. (Some of you may have seen my photos of the Place des Vosges on Facebook. Here’s a sampling.)

There are only four apartments in the building, one per floor. No elevator. Some years ago there was a change in proprietorship to the apartment upstairs from me, but the occupants of the two others have stayed put for the past 14 years: an Argentinian architect up top, a computer fellow downstairs.

This story is, ostensibly, about the fellow downstairs.

He has sensitive ears. And he doesn’t like it when I practice the cello or the piano at home.

Practice is normal; it’s my lifeblood; it’s oxygen, nourishment, pleasure, love, and also part of my work and my livelihood. At the time I moved here, I was preparing my first CD, “Old New Worlds” (an anthology of lyrical 20th-century music for cello and piano). I’d be hacking away at the Debussy sonata, and the fellow would ring my bell. “Could you please not practice before noon?”

Sure. Sure.

He’d ring the bell some days later, when I’d be hacking away at the Hindemith variations. “Could you please not practice on Sundays?”

Sure. Sure.

Then he’d ring the bell again when I was hacking at . . . well, you get the idea. Most of the time it was not possible for me to practice at home, whether I was hacking or playing beautifully. The musicians among you will understand how I felt. Finding a convenient home is a permanent worry, headache, heartache, and pain in the butt for the majority of musicians.

My choices were clear: kill the neighbor; give up the cello; or go practice somewhere else. Kicking and screaming, I looked for a music home away from home.

It took me some time to realize that there was a suite of practice rooms around the corner from me. It’s called Studio Campus. Good opening hours: 10 AM to midnight on weekdays, from 12 noon to 8 PM on weekends. Very inexpensive: five euros fifty per hour (six bucks). There’s a coffee machine, forty cents for an espresso. Friendly staff.

My shift to the Studio Campus coincided with the unfolding of a long-term process as regards my music making. The career of a mainstream cellist wasn’t suited to me, or me to it; to make a very long story very short, the career and I didn’t “fit.” My CD project of 2002 was partly a last hurrah. The thing is, I didn’t know what my true path was.

Believe it or not, it was at Studio Campus that I found my path.

After discovering Studio Campus, it took me some extra time to realize that practicing there was, like, you know, kinda nifty. Kinda, like, much better than practicing at home. I discovered that it was useful to book time slots in advance to practice. It created both a constraint and a commitment, like going to an office. It’s preferable not to have infinite amounts of time to practice. A strict schedule invites smarts.

The rooms at Studio Campus are acoustically well isolated. Plus, most people who practice and rehearse there are young rockers having a good time. If I decided to scream like a maniac for three hours, nobody would knock on my door and ask me not to scream on Sundays. This permanently removed a layer of judgment from my music making. I mean, self-judgment. You know how that goes: I had been as critical of myself as the downstairs fellow was.

I stopped practicing the mainstream repertory, and I started fooling around. I’d play long slow open strings, droning like a ship’s foghorn. I started hearing the drone’s harmonics. I started singing in unison with the drone, then in consonance and dissonance with the harmonics. It was divine. It made me want to sing ever more, and . . . I sang ever more, until I became a singer through and through.

My cycle "Don't Look Back" retells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. This is the opening number.

One day I was idly plucking the bottom strings in rhythm: C, G; C, G; C, G. I became as if transfixed. Some little tap opened in my brain, and I decided to improvise a no-holds-barred parody of Ravel’s “Bolero,” those C-G motherpluckers my only accompaniment. I made a fool of myself, and my voice became huge and perverted and ridiculous and gorgeous. I had connected to that ancestral fiend, the Trickster: an amoral monster who’ll do anything for a laugh, and who happens to be an archetype of creativity.

Another time I was tuning my cello, when one of the strings slipped well below its normal pitch. I pizzicato’ed it, then strummed all the strings together. Hmmm, interesting—let’s practice with this new tuning. Hmmm, let’s improvise a song. Hmmm, let’s cry for joy ‘cos we’re feelin’ real good. I had discovered the healing power of music, plus the art of scordatura (or unorthodox string tuning). Over the years, I ended up developing a huge repertoire of original compositions in varied tunings.

There are eight practice studios at Campus, each with a different set of acoustic qualities. It’s wonderful to alternate studios and hear whole new dimensions of your sound, day after day. Each studio has a drum kit. One day I decided to improvise a percussion piece: “Mano a Mano.” Here it is.

Each object is rich in sonic possibilities. Each hand is rich in kinesthetic possibilities. Hands, meet cymbal; cymbal, meet hands. Let the combat begin!

A young Frenchman who plays the taiko (a Japanese drum) got hold of me one day and said, “Let’s play together.” We got involved, and we’re now musical collaborators. The taiko and the scordatura cello, plus two singing and screaming voices? Never before in the history of music. We’re the first, and the only.

Ah, did I tell you that there’s a recording studio upstairs at Campus? Led by a sensitive and helpful engineer with a heart of gold? And did I tell you that I ended up recording an entire CD with Jean-charles Versari?

And did I tell you that I made friends and plugged into a community and started taking piano lessons? And did I tell you that we’d cry for joy ‘cos we were feelin’ real good? Sorry, I’m repeating myself now. You would repeat yourself, too, if you found your path three blocks away from home. “I found my path! I found my path! I found my path!”

Would all these things have happened if the fellow downstairs wasn’t bothered by my music making? It’s impossible to say for sure. The universe is an intricate web of forking paths, and anytime you turn left, you leave behind the millions of possibilities that existed to your right. Maybe I’d have stumbled upon the Studio Campus by some other combination of left-right-right-left moves. But believing in Destiny and its threshold guardians is much more fun than believing in pure chance. The fellow downstairs said, “Not here. There.” And I’m grateful I went there.

©2016, Pedro de Alcantara

Improvising at the Odess Theater in Sitka, Alaska.

Orpheus in the Underworld

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.

©2016, Pedro de Alcantara

Born to Dance

I looked up cousin in the dictionary, and one definition says that a cousin is “a relative descended from one’s grandparent or more remote ancestor by two or more steps and in a different line.” I’m not sure I understand every word in this definition, but I like it very much. I like the idea of descended relatives, I like the idea of remote ancestry, I like the idea of two or more steps (how about a thousand steps?), and I like the idea of different lines.

As I see it, dancing is a cousin of walking, descended from a remote common ancestor by two or more steps and in a different line. The common ancestor is, of course, locomotion.

My good friend Wikipedia tells me that “animal locomotion, in ethology, is any of a variety of movements or methods that animals use to move from one place to another.” Walking issues from the locomotion source; so do crawling, dancing, swimming, running, jumping, and a whole gaggle of actions involved in getting you from here to there, and from there to here.

Sensing the ancestral connections between dancing and walking is very useful. In fact, just thinking about it will light up some circuitry in body and mind. And the circuitry will get you loco-moving real nice.

A good starting point is the passage we made, as babies, from horizontal to vertical, via the diagonal. What drives the baby? The magnetic power of desire and intention, embodied as a spiraling movement.

Dancing means keeping your joints available. Whether you move or not, you’re ready to do it—ready and willing. Which joints shall move? The possibilities are endless, but hips, knees, and ankles make for a fine combo. We are innately available, and the least stimulus triggers our desire to move.

A little girl who’s already an expert walker starts shaping her walking into specific dancing steps. It’s interesting to see her learning process: lots of fun, lots of sensorial responses, lots of intuition and imitation—and a bit of watching, analyzing, and consciously trying to learn a posture or step. And it’s interesting to see that the adult dancers whom she’s modeling are . . . walking.

Dance-as-locomotion is only different from walking in that the rhythms and gestures are enhanced in some way. You could, if you wished, dance up and down the boulevard. And you wouldn’t look any crazier than ladies in high heels and tight skirts (who at any rate are doing their own ritualized walk-dance hybrid).

How much “dancing” does dancing involve? There’s a continuum from zero to infinity. Perform the most elaborate choreographies to the most complex sound tracks, and you’re dancing at one extreme of the continuum. Stand still and available, and you’re dancing at the other extreme of the continuum. Lift an arm, take a step; smile; you’re dancing somewhere along the continuum. Look at this fellow here. He’s so integrated that by simply taking a breath he’s dancing already.

And there’s dancing-dancing. You know: dancing. Watch the pros, and I bet you’ll see that they’re just walking after all. 

You're born to dance, but it doesn't mean you have to dance-dance. Just go from here to there, and you'll fulfill your destiny. But why not fulfill it in three-four time, syncopated?

©2016, Pedro de Alcantara

Boy Learns to Walk

A few years ago, I met a man who changed my life, wholly for the better. On first thougth, what he did for me seems banal, but . . . it’s the first thought that’s banal, not what he did for me.

He got me to walk barefoot.

The fellow is called John Woodward, and he’s an Alexander Technique teacher who has been walking barefoot, full-time, for several decades. Full-time means in all weather, all seasons, all restaurants, all professional settings, all all.

The way we met was interesting. We were attending a conference at an attractive university campus in Manchester, and we found ourselves together & alone at the threshold of the conference building. Our colleagues were inside, meeting and talking and quite possibly planning to save the world. But not the two of us; we were outside, we were outsiders. More precisely, we were liminal explorers, both of us in the habit of finding ourselves in between two worlds or two moments or two attitudes, in the frontier where the private becomes public (or vice versa), the unconscious crystalizes into an embodied insight (or vice versa), the material vibrates as energy (or vice versa). And also the liminal territory where alone becomes together.

Some months later, John wrote a piece about how we met, and he sent me his reading of it. I composed a soundtrack to it. If you suspect that John and I are deep into a bromance, you’re absolutely right.

John Woodward, a kindred spirit, gave me something very special in the summer of 2012: the courage to go barefoot. Here he tells you how we first met, in the frontier between the Known & the Unknown. Piano solo by yours, truly.

Anyway, back in Manchester John and I started talking. Until then I had never met a full-time barefoot walker, but I quickly sensed that John was on to something. He was poised, entertaining, and incisive in his comments about . . . well, about the meaning of life.

But from now on I’m going to leave John out of this. I’d like to relate my explorations of barefoot walking over the past four years, and some of the things I’ve learned from doing it.

Self-portrait.

I was an awkward child, introverted and disembodied – the kind of boy who was always the last one chosen for the team in school sports, ack! Back then I was a boneless chicken, and every attempt at flight ended in a crash. By birth, my legs and feet were sort of rubbery and shapeless; by habit, I made them rubberier and more shapeless. I twisted my left ankle often, scraped my knees, and tore my trousers at the least challenge (crossing the street, for instance).

Fast forward to 2012, when I met John. It took a lot of work, but I’m not so disembodied anymore. The chicken got himself a backbone, and flies around the world pretending to be an eagle. The only thing is, the chicken is still a little complexed about his legs and feet. Left and right sides are imbalanced and asymmetrical; buying shoes is always a problem; feet are tender and kinda squashed; callouses pop up unbidden. And the left ankle has a permanent low-level inflammation – I mean, 24/7/365, except for leap years, when it’s 24/7/366.

Habit has a lawyer, arguing in its favor as a voice in your head. “Barefoot walking? No, no, not for you. You’ll hurt yourself, trip over, twist the ankle. You don’t want that, do you?” Oh, no, no; I don’t want that. But the voice of Barefoot John, now living inside my brain, overrode the lawyer, and I began exploring soon after coming home from Manchester.

I started slow and easy, and built it up over months and years. The first thing was to walk barefoot around the Place des Vosges, near my home in central Paris. I’d go to the Place wearing sandals and take them off once I was safely inside. Then, I’d walk as if on proverbial eggshells: Little stones! Twigs! Gravel! Those things hurt, man! My feet are tender, don’t you know that? After many trips to the Place, I had a breakthrough. In themselves, the little stones didn’t hurt. In fact, they weren't triggers of pain but packets of information; the pain was just my way of reading the information, or rather, mis-reading it on account of my preconceived ideas. Pain is what you make of it. It was a big deal to make the switch.

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I would walk around the Place looking down at what I thought were the dangers littering the ground. I noticed that I pulled myself down in order to look down – as if I needed to “see the ground with my neck.” After a while I started “seeing with my eyes” and also “seeing with the soles of my feet,” and I became better able to walk upright and navigate the dangers (which in reality didn’t exist). That, too, was a big deal: To walk upright and alert makes the world less dangerous!

One day I walked back home barefoot, after my explorations at the Place des Vosges. And that, too, was a big deal: the first time I walked barefoot right in the city and not in a park or beach. It seemed daring to step as if naked on asphalt, on street puddles, on regular sidewalks.

Every few days or weeks there would be a “first time.” The first time I left the house barefoot, instead of waiting until I got to the Place des Vosges; the first time I left the house without taking sandals or shoes with me; the first time I rode the Paris metro barefoot; the first time I boarded an airplane barefoot; the first time I played a concert barefoot; the first rainy day; the first winter day; the first entire day in summer; the first entire day in winter.

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I think “first times” are a big deal. I certainly remember the first kiss as a big deal, also the first time traveling by plane, the first time singing in public; and the first sushi dinner, the first computer, the first foreign country, the first return back home after a foreign trip . . . the list could go on endlessly. First times are exciting, but also nerve-wracking, nausea-making. It’s a wonderful thing. Barefoot walking is a constant rediscovery of first times.

Changes started happening. Obviously with the feet themselves, which gained shape, structure, strength, length, and width. Suddenly I had toes! With their own little joints! Holy cow! If you remember, I had a low-level permanent inflammation in my left ankle. It’s gone. I can hardly describe what it feels like when a chronic displeasure disappears. And the displeasure had existential and identity-bound dimensions; it was a sort of handicap, with its accompanying shame. Gone, gone, gone . . . and just because I took up barefoot walking.

Suppose some deep-seated problem of yours had a simple solution, except that the solution “looked funny.” I bet you might be inclined to prefer the problem to the solution. I believe it’s a universal tendency. At the very least it's certain that we often need to "stay in the problem" for a long time before deciding to "get out of the problem." I'm 58 years old.

Everyday someone approaches me, to ask a question or make a remark. Little kids can’t resist commenting to their parents, within my earshot. “That man is walking barefoot! Pourquoi, maman?” I talked to one such little kid. “Don’t you walk barefoot, too?” He answered, “Barefoot in the beach, shoes in the city, I learned.” One day at a supermarket, a security guard came over. “Le monsieur est à l’aise,” he said, wistfully. “The mister is comfortable.” He was African, and he told me that back home he walked barefoot all the time, but his Parisian job required shoes. He couldn’t find a comfortable pair of shoes, he was always in pain, his back hurt, his whole body suffered. And here I was, a Johnny-come-lately becoming a sort of reverse model for someone who considered his barefoot walking a birthright, now denied.

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People ask to take my photo. A young man at Midway Airport in Chicago, friendly and eager. A cop at a street demonstration in Paris said, “My wife won’t believe me.” Everyone has the same three questions: “Aren’t you cold?” “Isn’t it dirty?” “Aren’t you afraid of broken glass?” And no one really believes me when I say, “I love it. I feel really good.”

Walking barefoot, I receive surges of energy; sometimes I feel like singing or shouting or speaking to myself or playacting or . . . expressing my joy in some way or another. And so it happens, that I walk barefoot in Paris, talking to myself and singing and speaking in tongues.

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One sunny winter day I was going to my local café, for my morning writing session. I carried my laptop computer in a soft case, and nothing else. Two cops riding bicycles noticed me and stopped to address me. A young woman and a young man from Central Casting, slim and good-looking as only Parisian cops can be. From atop her bicycle, the woman led the conversation. “Aren't you cold?” she asked. And I could tell right away that she was making some calculations, trying to determine if I was homeless and perhaps in need of psychiatric help. “I’m comfortable, thank you. I make a habit of it.” You should see her face and her gaze . . . any one thing I said would feed her convictions. I wanted to laugh, to tell her, “Look! I’m carrying a computer!” (“He’s crazy.”) “I write books!” (“He really must be crazy.”) “My publisher! Oxford University Press! New York! (“He’s nuts.”) So I tried not to laugh and not to say much. “Aren’t you afraid of broken glass?” she asked. “You ride bicycles,” I answered. “Every year a handful of Parisian cyclists die in traffic. But I haven’t died of barefoot walking yet.” But I’m not sure she heard me. After five minutes we went our separate ways.

Walking barefoot makes you quite attentive to the environment. The risks of stepping on broken glass are much smaller than generally assumed, since you simply watch where you’re going. Regardless, you don’t take anything for granted when barefoot, but you do take things for granted when you wear shoes. I feel downright irresponsible with shoes on, disconnected, distracted. Plus, there are so many textures for your naked soles to detect and react to: concrete, earth, grass, sand, wood, asphalt, multiple types of stone. The wealth of sensorial information is astounding. Walking with shoes on is like watching the movies wearing a night mask and earplugs.

One tends to think of barefoot walking as what babies and children do at home, and as what adults do at the beach, where they become like children. Barefoot walking, in other words, is “childish.” But how do you explain the attentiveness, the suppleness, the strength, the structure, the courage, the responsible-ness, the nerve, the initiative, the control that come with barefoot walking? I’ve never felt so manly and integrated. I still have much work to do, of course; I don’t walk barefoot full-time, like my friend and brother John; not yet, anyway. But I can say that taking my shoes off, and my socks too, has been like a new birth. I’m now baby, boy, and man, all at the same time. 

©2016, Pedro de Alcantara

Open the door, and let me in!

Would you like to hang-glide over Mount Everest? It's a breeze . . . if you know how to do it.

Hang-gliding over Everest is exactly like making an omelet: until you know how to do it, you don't know how to do it. Speaking foreign languages, playing the violin, swimming, you name it: if it's a skill, you have to learn it in some way or another.

"I have no talent for languages." "Swimming doesn't come naturally to me." "I can't improvise at the cello. It's so difficult!" We all react in this way as regards any number of skills, which vary from person to person. And we feel certain that these skills are eternally out of reach for us. This tends to predetermine the outcome: No languages, no swimming, no improvising. The door is closed! 

If you want to, you can open that door.

When it comes to learning skills, the skills themselves are secondary and peripheral. What's primary and central is the attitude that you bring to the job of learning the skills. As soon as you relegate skills to their proper, secondary place, everything becomes easier to learn.

Attitude is a predisposition. It requires no experience, no technique, no knowledge. It only requires the willingness to enter into something. It’s an acknowledgment of infinite possibilities further ahead, while skill means to inhabit one or more of those possibilities. The attitude is malleable, adaptable; specific technical skills are constructed, as it were: tangible realities, defined in gesture, sound, movement, or any other medium.

Children embody the attitude, which for them is as natural as breathing. It combines curiosity and playfulness, and it’s completely nonjudgmental. Is a baby afraid of looking ridiculous? Not for a second. Is a toddler afraid of looking ridiculous? It’s possible, but there are some who love to be funny and to trigger laughter, which is a way of being ridiculous--on purpose.

This baby boy doesn’t have the skill to do the hula hoop, but to him it doesn’t matter one iota. The attitude is everything.

Time passes, and the baby becomes a child. Among other things, “becoming” means developing skills, which is the same as giving individual shape to your underlying attitude.

Time passes some more, and the child becomes a young woman. Skills develop in increments, while the attitude remain constant—and totally independent of the pursuit of skill.

To my eyes, one wonderful thing about these young performers is the no-big-deal ease they display. The ease comes from internalizing instructions and gestures. “This is what I’m going to do. It requires this, this, and this. I’ll practice it all, and I’ll keep practicing forever. I love practicing.” True skill means the absence of struggle, although the learning of a skill may involve struggle—or at least the willingness to fail repeatedly in order to succeed.

Here’s another kid who redefines the pursuit of skill. His performance is perfect in itself, independent of high technical skills set to objective standards. It’s perfect because fully embodied, willed, and borne of love.

He’s responding to a great Brazilian musician, Luiz Gonzaga. Watch the master being perfect in himself, with skills developed over decades of playing, playing, and playing. Gonzaga is surrounded by accomplished pros, but you can be sure all of them were little kids once upon a time, with no skills but plenty of attitude.

Writing, cooking, performing brain surgery, running the country: they’re all the same, in that they require the steady, incremental acquisition of skills . . . plus the attitude without which the skills can’t exist.

Suppose you need to take ten steps to learn the skills you’re aiming for. It’ll go like this:

• Attitude, plus step #1.
• Attitude, plus steps #1 and 2.
• Attitude, plus steps #1 and 2 and 3.

And on, and on.

It’s no use wanting to get to #10 while avoiding #9 or #6 or any intermediate step. And it’s no use wanting to acquire skills without embodying the attitude to begin with. However long it takes you to get there, you’ll do it step by step.

See you at the top of Mount Everest! And don't forget to bring your accordion.

©2016, Pedro de Alcantara

The Task is You

What is craftsmanship?

Let's go visit Claude Monet, in his later years, painting in his garden in Giverny. To my way of thinking, he integrates five dimensions at the same time: the garden, to which he keeps turning his receptive gaze; the palette in left his hand, where he finds the colors he’ll employ stroke by stroke; the brush, which is amalgamated with his right hand; the canvas, where he imprints his decisions; and the totality of his self—that is, his presence, his back and shoulders and arms, his energies and desires. I don’t think he’s painting; I think he’s working on himself through the work on his materials, and one of the results of this work is “painting.”

This is unique film of French Impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840-1926), painting outdoors, 'en plein air', in his garden at Giverny. The footage is in two segments. Firstly we see the artist outdoors talking to a gentleman. Then we see Monet painting a water lily-padded pond, a subject for which he is most famed.

It’s really tempting to see a separation between you and the world, or you and the object that you’re handling, or you and the thing that you’re making. But your thoughts and gestures make the sounds you make when you play the cello, your thoughts and gestures cause your relationships to go the way the go, your thoughts and gestures produce your email or blog post. The thing in the end is “you, in disguise.”

With a skill like pottery, you can see how the potter’s thoughts and gestures are in the process of disguising themselves as a material object.

The exhibit "Icheon: Reviving the Korean Ceramic Tradition" was on display at the American Museum of Ceramic Art, AMOCA from October 12th- December 29th, 2013.

So, you don’t make a clay pot; you work on your thoughts and gestures, and they become a pot. Or any other thing. Craftsmanship in this sense isn’t simply skill or technique; rather, it’s the meeting between the individual and his or her task; the melding between the two, where the individual “is” the task.

A commercial sign maker’s craftsmanship is essentially no different from Monet’s.

Trabalho de André Andrade - Cartazista do Carrefour de Recife Saiba mais em: http://www.ideafixa.com/a-tipografia-do-trabalhador-brasileiro/

To put simply, the medium of craftsmanship is immaterial. It doesn’t matter how you engage in craftsmanship: pen and paper, clay, chalk, wood, sound, or light are all the same, because it’s the engagement itself that counts.

Pardon My Dust, takes you into a world of art very much unexplored and discovers a unique sketch adventure that has become a very special art form. A canvas, many of us have seen, but never used, Peter Han has transformed into chalk art. Witness Peter's incredible talent as he discusses how he achieves his calculated art of illustrating, he calls "Dynamic Sketching." Directed by Adriel de la Torre Filmed with the Red Scarlet. Camera by Roman Arriola and Freddy Duarte Assistant Camera by Brandon Ruta Edited by Roman Arriola Executive Produced by Randy Martinez Music by Tim Garland "The Architects Eye" from audionetwork.com contact@snowglobestudios.net www.peterhanstyle.com

The smallest things in your life are the result of your craftsmanship: a peanut butter sandwich, for instance. The scope of your process as you make the sandwich may be narrower and shallower than Monet’s process as he paints, but the actual process is the same: your back and legs, your life story, your breathing habits; tools, a rhythm, a style; gestures, materials; the “product” is always a “by-product.”

Caleb and Annie teach Hayley to make a PB&J!

When we look at one of his finished paintings, we witness Monet’s processes—not just his hand-to-eye coordination, but his psychology, his life story, the way he moved and breathed. If a painting is great, it’s because the painter’s processes are somehow integrated: affirmative, directed, and connected. The painting makes an impact on the viewer in part because it’s a manifestation of coherence. By proxy, or indirectly, the manifestation of Monet’s coherence renders the viewer coherent as well—a little or a lot, depending; the viewer feels excited, elevated, and grateful.

We feel excited and elevated when we see a kid doing something simple but well—because in that moment the kid is coherent, and we love him or her for it. I mean, the kid isn’t just cute; she represents something bigger than herself; and we “become big with her, through her.”

Talent, concentration, dedication.

Ah, no, I don’t know how to define coherence any better than I know how to define craftsmanship. But I’ll put some words out there: organic logic, balance, purposefulness, the mind having become the body and the body having become the mind. And, even harder to explain: the dissolution of the ego, the individual’s becoming affirmed by disappearing into the task.

Amazing kid with excellent basketball skills!

You can craft a sentence; you can craft a relationship; you can craft a stratagem to undo conflict. The process is the same: your life story, your breathing habits; a rhythm, a style; choices and decisions, in space and time. And the end product is always the same: you, in disguise.

Uploaded by Top Viral Network on 2015-04-14.

©2016, Pedro de Alcantara

The Long and the Short of It

I’ve been working on a book titled THE INTEGRATED STRING PLAYER. It’s an ambitious project, in length and scope. Once printed, the book will probably be about 350 pages long, and it'll include several dozen music examples. In addition, there’ll be a dedicated website with 80 video clips and 10 audio clips.

Ostensibly, the book is about musical techniques for violinists, cellists, and other string players, but it contains many concepts and tools that might be of interest not only to all musicians but also to non-musicians. If you’ve been receiving my newsletters for a while, you may have read a couple of excerpts from it. Here they are:

Before Everything Else, Do Nothing

Moving Identity

Writing music down is a complex art. There are hundreds of rules about key signatures, time signatures, clefs, instrumentation, note values and relationships, flats and sharps, dynamics, beams and stems, and so on. Musicians learn these rules partly by technical training, partly by trial and error. The rules are so complex that most musicians have blind spots, gaps, and misunderstandings. And behind our blind spots and gaps, there lurk fears and anxieties.

To set the music examples on the book, I used a program called Sibelius (named after a great Finnish composer). It’s like word processing for music scores.

In order to use the program, you have to have a decent understanding of music rules, of course; plus, you have to have a decent understanding of the software itself. Given how complex music is, the software is necessarily complex, too. It doesn’t matter how user-friendly the thing is—you still need to learn a million things to be able to use it properly. The whole endeavor is complexity, multiplied.

The Sibelius manual is 800 pages long.

To describe one of the exercises in the book, I needed to create a page of music with an intricate graphic design. How long did it take me to do it?

Hours, minutes, and seconds, measured by the clock, would seem to make time a linear and straightforward matter. The clock makes time appear objective. Everybody knows what five minutes means! The only problem is that the clock and your mind work in different ways. The clock’s predictable objectivity doesn’t correspond to how life feels to you.

The page I created is about an exercise I learned from one of my cello teachers, Mr. Aldo Parisot, around 1981 or 1982. I’ve been practicing the exercise ever since, and over the decades I’ve also taught it to dozens of players. It’s a wonderful exercise that really helps a string player coordinate his or her left hand at the instrument. So, I’ve spent 35 years practicing, teaching, describing, and annotating the exercise, which I call The Cat’s Leap.

I bought my Sibelius software around 2005. At first I was quite intimidated and discouraged by how much work there seemed to be in learning how to use it. I’d open the program, fiddle with it a little, and give up. Postponement and avoidance, guilt and shame, woo hoo! But about two years ago I started using the program more regularly and more intelligently. It’s indeed a complex program—there’s no way around it—but it happens to be exceedingly useful. I’ve spent 11 years circling around Sibelius and finding ways of dealing with it (or, more precisely, dealing with my postponement and avoidance, which isn't really about Sibelius).

I think I spent ten, 12, or 15 hours all counted on the page in question. But most of the time, I was studying Sibelius and its workings. The hours spent on the page will make future score-setting endeavors go much faster for me.

How long did it take me to write the book? How long did it take me to record my 80 video clips? How long did it take me to revise and edit them? How long did it take me to record my 10 audio clips? How long—

Well, you get the idea. How long do things take?

The time that it takes to do something is also the time that it takes for you to learn to do it.

I’m turning 58 this year. It takes me a second to type three words at the computer, but it has taken me 58 years to get to the point here & now, where it takes me a second to type three words at the computer. 58 years, 35 years, 11 years, 15 hours, a minute, a second—they’re all happening at the same time. The real clock is a kaleidoscope, a spiral, a labyrinth, a ziggurat, a mirage; time has a thousand interlocking dimensions, and your life is as long as it is short.

It feels really good to learn things, and it feels really good to spend time learning things. And time spent learning is immeasurable.

Mr. Parisot, by the way, is 95 years old and going strong, still teaching at Yale and conducting his cello ensemble, still a rambunctious little boy. He's the Cat's Leap, personified!

©2016, Pedro de Alcantara

The Art of Disappearing

Although he’s immortal, Shakespeare died 450 years ago. We all have been touched by his insights on what it means to be human, even if we aren’t intimately familiar with his plays and poetry. I grew up in Brazil, speaking our local version of Portuguese: “Ser ou não ser, eis a questão.” Miraculously, in translation, too, Shakespeare retained his power.

To celebrate this anniversary, I took a bit from Hamlet and added my spin to it—my translation, as it were. Hamlet is directing a play, the hidden purpose of which is to unmask his father’s murderer. He gives a speech to his players, counseling them on how to act. Some people believe that Shakespeare uses this dramatic occasion to manifest his own convictions as regards what we might call the ideal actor . . . which might be an embodiment of the ideal human being. If you’re a musician, dancer, actor, stand-up comedian, politician, public speaker, orator, or priest, you’d benefit from pondering Hamlet’s advice. And if you’re just a normal human being sitting at a Starbucks and checking your emails, sit up and listen!

HAMLET

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.

Be lightfooted, agile & clear.

But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines.

“As lief” means “as gladly.” If you start huffing and puffing, we’ll get a better huffer puffer—such as that fool the town crier—to do it in your place.

Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently, for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.

Don’t overdo the exterior aspects of your act. Keep your cool even when you-as-an actor and you-as-a-character are in the eye of an emotional storm.

O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise.

It’s disagreeable to watch a ham play down to cheap tastes. Robustious: vigorous in a rough or unrefined way. Periwig is a highly stylized wig worn as headgear in olden days. Groundlings: spectators with inferior tastes.

I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant. It out-herods Herod. Pray you avoid it.

There were several historical figures called Herod at the time of Jesus. Details apart, we’ll just consider them a bunch of wicked people. When you overplay, you’re more wicked than Herod. Termagant is a harsh-tempered or overwhelming woman; or an imaginary deity of turbulent character, often appearing in morality plays; from Italian trivigante, referring to the moon wandering between earth, heaven, and hell. Such deities include Selene, Artemis and Persephone.

Heed anger, and you might be able to avoid fury. Scordatura cello (from the bottom up, G G D G).

Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure

Art is like a mirror, showing things in an enhanced manner and allowing us to see our own selves in that enhanced manner. As a performer, become invisible, so that your listeners and viewers can see the mirror of art (rather than the person of the artist) and, through the mirror or art, see themselves in a new, powerful, meaningful light.

Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve, the censure of the which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others.

By emoting you can make shallow listeners laugh, but you’ll upset discerning spectators. It’s better to please one discerning spectator than a whole theater of undiscerning ones.

O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly (not to speak profanely), that neither having th’ accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. Reform it altogether!

If you force the emotions in your music making or acting, you’ll be so phony as to become abominable. Give up the phoniness already!

And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them, for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That’s villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.

Don’t let the clowns run loose and overwhelm the play. The play is more important than the player; the music is more important than the musician. Don’t let gimmicks and effects distract you or your listeners from the more serious matter of the music itself.

Go make you ready.

Let the fun start!

©2016, Pedro de Alcantara

Stop thinking!

Years ago I had a cello student whom I’ll call Susanne. She was a beginner in her early fifties, and she had had a tough, mean, incompetent cello teacher before me. In some ways she was worse off than a total beginner. At the cello, she had multiple bad habits and handicaps, musical as well as psychological. She was uncoordinated and reactive; the least bit of information from me sent her into a tizzy of fear. She was afraid of not understanding the exercise, not knowing what to do, not pleasing the teacher, and so on. I’d ask her to do a simple thing—play a C-major scale in two octaves, two notes per bow—and she’d freak out. Her eyes froze, her breathing went shallow. When she entered that state, she essentially left my presence. I could strip to my underwear and she wouldn’t have noticed it.

Susanne called that state of hers “thinking.” She’d swear she was thinking about the cello, about music, about the C-major scale. She believed she was trying to calculate what fingerings to use, where to place the bow. But the truth is that she had fallen into temporary insanity: she was paralyzed by fear, by the traumas of the past, by her suppositions about herself and the cello. Her thoughts were overcome by a swarm of negative emotions, all of which we could simply name “judgment & punishment.”

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I’d try to catch her attention. I’d wave my hand in front of her face. I’d clap my hands, make faces, whistle. The only thing that worked was to actually remove the cello from her hands. As I did that, I’d say to her, “Stop thinking.”

It was a joke, of course, because she wasn’t thinking.

After a while we got it so that, every time she fell into her frazzled panic, I’d say “Stop thinking!” and she’d break out of it with a smile. The smile indicated that her mind was clear, and then we’d be able to start working on actual cello playing.

When we think that we’re thinking, we’re actually doing any number of other things: feeling, sensing, reacting, freaking out, and above all judging. When we stop judging, proper thinking becomes so unobstructed that we become clairvoyant; we see and understand everything. This proper thinking includes a non-intellectual dimension that we might call “intuition” or “creativity.”

Our minds work in complex ways, and we don’t have good words to describe states of the brain. Even “states of the brain” is a misnomer, since there isn’t and there can’t be a separation between the body and the mind, between the mental and physical. Every state of the brain is a whole-person state And I believe that states of the brain tend not to be easily categorized, as if you were either this or that: either in the left brain or right brain, either rational or irrational, either analytical or intuitive, either bread or cheese. I think our minds tend to be like minestrone. Its ingredients have been simmering in the pot for a good while, and you can’t un-cook the tomatoes and separate them from the beans.

My student’s agitation, which she called “thinking,” was a problem. But the solution turned out to be a version of the problem, as it were; a sort of Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hide’s problem. It, too, is called “thinking.”

I believe Susanne entered a trance at the cello. That was the problem. And I believe she learned to enter a different type of trance at the cello. That was the solution.

My Mac OS desktop dictionary defines trance as “a half-conscious state characterized by an absence of response to external stimuli, typically as induced by hypnosis or entered by a medium; a state of abstraction.”

My word-processing dictionary says it is “a state in which somebody is dazed or stunned or in some other way unaware of the environment and unable to respond to stimuli; a hypnotic or cataleptic state; a state of rapture or exaltation in which somebody loses consciousness; the state of apparent semi-unconsciousness that a spiritual medium enters into, allegedly in an attempt to communicate with the dead.”

A state of abstraction! Catalepsy! Allegations! Communicating with the dead! You can see trance is sensational.

And impossible to define.

A voodoo priestess, communing with the spirits of the dead after a frenzied ceremony, is in trance. But a three-year-old watching a cartoon on TV is also in trance. When you’re at the supermarket trying to remember what your wife told you to pick up, you enter a trance. Your mind goes zip zoop zap, you free-associate, you hallucinate a little, and—yes! Toilet paper!

Let’s just say trance is many things, including a portal to knowledge and insight belonging to either your inner processes, or—allegedly! sensationally!—to unfathomable sources outside yourself. Alive or dead, those sources are fundamental to your wellbeing. It behooves you to tap them.

States of trance are so common, so ordinary, so habitual for all of us that we might deem them inevitable, an integral part of the human experience, like breathing, circulation, and digestion. In a trance you might isolate yourself from the people around you, at a time when they need you, or when you need them. You might not notice that the house is burning down, because listening to Abba on your iPod has put you into a cataleptic trance. On the other hand, in a trance you might be able to access hidden riches, reserves of talent, intuition, information; you might be able to overcome a physical or psychological block; you might be able to learn something quickly and thoroughly; you might be able to tap into your unconscious, and, beyond it, the energies of the whole interconnected universe.

So, there are many types and degrees of trance, and merits and demerits to all these states. But suppose you decide you want to be in a trance for constructive purposes, to learn, to create, to find solace, to heal. How can you enter a trance?

Both extreme agitation (Frank Sinatra about to enter the stage! Bobbysockers fainting left and right!) and extreme calm (a long meditative session in the dark…) can trigger trance states. Sounds, sights, movement, smells can all trigger trances. The smell of incense burning might put you in a light trance. But so might the smells of coffee brewing and cookies baking. Or a favorite perfume that your nose detects on a pretty woman who walks by.

Locomotion is trance-inducing. Walk around the square or plaza, or walk around the block, or just pace your living room. If you do it for long enough, with a certain pace and rhythm, you’ll enter a trance. If you dance, alone or with a partner, in public or in private, to music or even to silence, you’ll enter a trance. If you ride a bicycle, stationery or mobile, you’ll enter a trance. A regular rhythm is part of it. Body and breath, mind and eyes, they all submit to the rhythmic pattern and re-organize themselves.

Looking fixedly at a point or image might put you into a trance. Looking at a moving image might put you into a trance. Sitting in a dark movie theater might put you into a trance, even in the absence of an actual movie being shown. Wave a finger back and cross in front of your eyes. Look at the moving finger, and you might enter a trance. Look at whatever lies beyond your finger—a wall, passing cars, the TV—and you might enter a trance.

It seems illogical, but in fact it makes perfect sense. Psychophysical states are most often a paradoxical combination of opposing forces, such as reason and unreason, consciousness and the subconscious, left brain and right brain. It’s therefore logical that contradictory stimuli—sound and silence, agitation and meditation, locomotion and rest—might put the mind into a trance. The trance is a paradox; the trigger of the trance is a paradox, too.

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For a period of three years I wrote a very short story every day. Most often I did it at night, sitting at home. But I wrote stories while riding the subway, while waiting for my wife while she tried on clothes at a store, on airplanes and trains. To start the story, I needed to enter some sort of trance; not a voodoo frenzy but a light-hearted dreamy space. Sometimes I sat on the couch nibbling at the plastic cap of my pen. Sometimes I looked at my bookshelves, not singling out volumes and titles, but just running my eyes slowly back and forth and up and down, taking in the irregular patterns of books.

On occasion it took me forty minutes of sitting and waiting until the brain was good and ready. Once I passed through the portal, though, the story would practically write itself. A character would enter the page and say something I couldn’t have imagined just a second before. A tone of voice emerged, and the story unfolded in a style I had never before used. A secondary character would come in and take over, start a fight, or say something so absurd that I’d have to stop writing and just laugh until I cried.

I think Susanne learned to exit the Mr. Hyde trance and enter the Dr. Jekyll trance. Life’s traumas triggered her Hyde trance at the cello. The Jekyll trance was triggered by a guy taking something away from her—the actual, physical cello—while speaking soothing words with a bedside manner: “Stop thinking. Stop thinking. Stop thinking, my friend. Ah, thank you. You look so sweet when you aren’t thinking! Here, I have a cello for you.” And the world of music was hers to explore.

©2016, Pedro de Alcantara

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Listen, my friend!

Listen, my friend!

We’ll define an acoustician simply as “someone who has a feeling for sound.” (The word comes from the Greek akoustikos, from akouein, “hear.”) Every human being is an acoustician of some sort, including totally deaf people—who perceive sound as vibrations that pass through their bodies. You can be an informal amateur acoustician, or a more dedicated and organized one.

To put it differently, you can really gain something from deepening your listening skills.

Your path toward acoustic awareness starts with exploring two modes of listening. We’ll call them acquisitive and receptive. These modes apply to all domains of awareness, including the visual, kinesthetic, spatial, and olfactory, to list just a few.

You’re acquisitive when you have a goal, the desire to capture information precisely, the need to pay attention to something or someone, or the obligation to reuse, later on, the information you’re capturing. You’re acquisitive when you use analytical capabilities, labels, comparisons, and judgments. You’re acquisitive when you want to be better than someone else at the game. It’s a wonderful ability to have at your disposal: when you’re skillfully acquisitive, you get a lot of things done. It represents the adult in you, responsible and focused.

You’re receptive when you put aside goals, desires, needs, obligations, comparisons, and judgments. Having no objectives, you might not get anything done, although you’re likely to have all sorts of rich sensorial experiences. It’s another wonderful ability to have at your disposal. It represents the child in you, innocent, curious, and open to everything.

When you’re acquisitive, your mind works as a kind of vacuum cleaner, sucking things in and holding them in place. Of some people it’s said that their minds are like steel traps, and this is a big compliment. Such people have the ability to see things clearly and quickly, and to remember things reliably. It’s good to know how to gather information and retain it, but the overly acquisitive fellow becomes a hoarder who can’t keep track of all the hairballs in his collection.

When you’re receptive, your mind becomes an empty space, where things come and go. You become free of hairballs, but at the price of holding and owning nothing. It’s possible to be very receptive and very generous at the same time. Then you let go of everything that you receive. This might become a form of inattention and forgetfulness. What happens when you need to retrieve important information from your memory? It’s gone. You gave it away, or you let it pass without taking notice of it.

When you’re acquisitive, you go toward things, information, people, situations, and sensation. When you’re receptive, information and sensation comes toward you. Acquisition is more active, reception more passive. There are pluses and minuses to both approaches. Balancing them, alternating between them, and putting them into dynamic opposition is far better than using either of them exclusively.

Two long-lost cousins come for a visit. They’re descendants from an aunt you’ve never met, and they still live in the old country far away. They’re full of familial love for you, and they express it with generosity and urgency. The only problem is that they don’t speak a word of English. Their native tongue is literally foreign.

If you’re acquisitive, you’ll desperately try to listen, wanting to understand and feeling that you should understand. Instead of listening, though, you’ll spend your energies primarily on wanting something you can’t have, having disagreeable emotions, and passing judgment on yourself and on your cousins.

If you’re receptive, you’ll capture sounds, vibrations, moods, and all sorts of information other than the technical sense of the words being spoken. You might still not understand anything intellectually, but you’ll have an experience of the thing itself (the cousins expressing your love for you in a foreign language) rather than an experience of your filters and blockages. Receptive listening, in our imaginary situation, improves the emotional experience by allowing you to let go of intellectual demands that are impossible to fulfill. It can be good, then, for you to listen to foreign things without trying to understand them: movies without subtitles, TV shows from incomprehensible cultures, sermons preached in a language you can’t identify. YouTube has millions and millions of clips for you to enjoy in this manner. And after you get good at the game, listen to people you used to judge harshly and let them be interesting foreigners to your ears.

Sound has a spatial component. In a café, sounds come at you from all directions; it’s as if you’re listening to a very informal composition in spatial music. Receptive listening accepts the space, so to speak; it isn’t bothered or confused by sounds coming from multiple sources and traveling unpredictably in space. Acquisitive listening is more linear, since it tends to concentrate on one strand, one location, one set of sounds that become somehow separated from the environment.

Listen, and you'll hear.

In the busy café of our example you can direct your listening toward a group of people or toward a single person within a group. This means you can bend, shape, and reshape the field of listening, contracting and expanding it at will. You might decide to block out most sounds so that you can concentrate on writing an email. This is a contraction of your listening. Or you might relax and let all sounds come at you willy-nilly. Then you’ll be expanding your field of listening. Spatial listening, with its expanding and contracting capabilities, allows you to sit in the back of the second violin section in an orchestra and actually hear the double basses, the first oboe, the harp, and whatever else you want to hear, be it for your pleasure or for the purpose of placing your sounds.

While attending a concert, practice the skill of expanding and contracting your listening field. Decide that you’ll tune the music out. Sit there looking like a normal concertgoer, but contract your listening field until the orchestra on stage virtually disappears. Then start expanding. Decide you’ll concentrate on the clarinetist, regardless of what else is happening sonically. After you listen linearly to the clarinetist, decide to scan the hall. Use your eyes if you wish, or close your eyes and use your ears only. Scan the orchestra from left to right, from right to left; go from the back of the stage to the back of the hall behind you; take in the public and their sounds, the coughing, the chairs squeaking, the occasional cell phone ringing. Go inside yourself and listen to the sounds you’re making, your breathing, the crackling vertebrae when you turn your head sideways. Then go back out of your head and return to the concert.

It’ll be quite a trip.

©2016, Pedro de Alcantara

Work in Progress

A couple of months ago I decided to practice in public. I booked a large room at a music studio near where I live, and I gathered two friends, two students, and a friend’s friend whom I hadn’t met before. I played about ten of my compositions, some for solo cello, some for cello and voice.

One of the pieces I played twice, in two diverging interpretations—first showy and full of choreographed movements, then sober and discreet. I played a short piece as if on a loop, repeating it many times and only varying a few details here in there. I gave myself permission to correct notes and phrases, replaying them as if the compositions themselves had been written with reiterations of these phrases. I did an unaccompanied vocal improvisation that I didn’t know I was going to do: I sang a sustained pitch, varying its vowels and dynamics, and I used my hands as megaphones and mutes—that is, I placed my hands in front of my mouth and I shaped and reshaped them, creating fantastical sound effects. I probably entered a trance state after a minute of doing it, and I probably made a fool of myself. I can’t say for sure.

Although I wore a clean white dress shirt and I sat on a stage, and although my audience sat in a semicircle as if at a regular performance, the whole thing was . . . not-a-concert, for the lack of a better name. I simply spun my music materials, and I worked on myself as I made music; and my friends watched, listened, and gave me feedback.

Okay, there actually s a better name to this whole enterprise: it's called work in progress. We sometimes hear of a dance company opening its doors to the public and showing a new, unfinished choreography as work in progress. The term, then, has its uses in the arts and in performance. And we sometimes use the term as if partly joking: “How’s your health faring these days?” “Oh, you know . . . work in progress. A day at a time.”

I’m proposing that we broaden the concept, and that we apply it to everything that we do and to life itself. I’m proposing that we kinda take it seriously, man!

We suppose that certain things are fairly set in stone. We’ll take the Bible as an example. The Bible is the Bible, right? The good book was written long ago. And the Ten Commandments have been there since the first edition! The only thing is, there doesn’t exist a single Bible; rather, there exists a repository of stories told by many people over about a thousand years, and out of this repository varying anthologies have been gathered and continue to be gathered. The Jewish anthology of these stories, for instance, isn’t the same as the Christian anthology; the Catholic anthology differs from the Protestant one; authorities pick fights as to what stories should or should not be called sacred and, therefore, anthologized.

Then there’s the matter of translating the ancient texts into modern languages. Here’s a verse from the Bible, in a handful of translations:

King James Bible

Whoso loveth instruction loveth knowledge: but he that hateth reproof is brutish.

International Standard Version

The person who loves correction loves knowledge, but anyone who hates a rebuke is stupid.

Aramaic Bible in Plain English

He that loves discipline loves knowledge, and he that hates reproof is a fool.

GOD'S WORD® Translation

Whoever loves discipline loves to learn, but whoever hates correction is a dumb animal.

Jubilee Bible 2000

Whosoever loves chastening loves knowledge, but he that hates reproof is carnal.

King James 2000 Bible

Whosoever loves instruction loves knowledge: but he that hates reproof is senseless.

Brutish, stupid, fool, a dumb animal, carnal, and senseless: Do they really mean the same thing? And how about reproof, rebuke, and correction? After you translate the verse, you need to interpret it. What exactly do these words mean, and how will they affect your behavior? As I see it, the Bible is a work in progress. I probably prefer being corrected to being rebuked, although I like being right most of all!

Objects, too, are in a process of change. The white-marble Roman and Greek sculptures we love so much were painted in garish polychromy back in the days. Creepy!

From the Smithsonian History Blog.

Houses, buildings, and roads are forever moving, sagging, expanding, contracting, and otherwise transforming themselves. Believe it or not, the Brooklyn Bridge is a work in progress.

The Pritzker Prize honors architects, and is considered as prestigious as the Nobel Prize. This year it was given to Alejandro Arevena, who’s from Chile. His projects take the idea of work in progress seriously, man!

Mr. Arevena’s Santiago-based firm, Elemental, has spearheaded a participatory design-build process it calls “half of a good house,” which allows residents to complete the work themselves later and play an active role in raising their own standard of living. “We transform the lack of resources into a principle of incrementality,” Mr. Aravena said. “Let’s do now what is more difficult. Let families take care of the rest through their own means.”

The house itself is a work in progress; architecture is a work in progress; the architect is a work in progress; the architect’s understanding of the world is a work in progress. The object, the field of knowledge, the person, and the idea are all works in progress.

My compositions are works in progress; my abilities as a player and singer are works in progress; my person, as it were, is a work in progress. When a concert becomes "practicing in public," the work-in-progress principle becomes embodied on stage.

You, too, are a work in progress. Let your doings, sensings, and thinkings change and grow every day. And make sure you're never, ever finished!

Practice

Isn’t it strange that you can practice law, practice the piano, have a spiritual practice, and practice for your wedding?

Maybe it’s just a play on words. Or maybe the word “practice” itself is rich in meaning, and therefore useful to us. It comes to us from Greek, via Latin.

Greek praktikos "fit for action, fit for business; business-like, practical; active, effective, vigorous," from praktos "done; to be done," verbal adjective of prassein, prattein "to do, act, effect, accomplish."

To act, to accomplish; effective, vigorous. And “not theory.” Not in your head, not in a book, not a dogma, not dead. Practice must be a doing, even if you practice it in a Zen-like non-doing manner.

For our purposes, we’ll define it as something that you do regularly, in a committed and organized manner, leading to an increase in awareness and presence. It exists in a thousand forms, including the professional set of skills learned and performed with a particular frame of mind (to practice law), the creative set of skills borne of exercising specific gestures over weeks, months, and years (to practice the piano), and the quest for connection with the ineffable through prayer, meditation, song, and sacrifice (to have a spiritual practice).

How to practice practice, so to speak? Walking works beautifully for many people. Decide to walk every day—perhaps to and from work. Or perhaps as a break from work: a walk in the park, or pacing the rooftop terrace of your office building and thinking about life over a hundred rounds of a very short walk, back and forth, back and forth. Walking the dog is a practice.

You can get serious and take the Road to Santiago, the pilgrimage first established in the 9th century. Walk from somewhere in Western Europe all the way to Santiago de Compostella in northwestern Spain.

Or decide to walk barefoot, full-time or part-time. My friend John does it full-time, and he’s, like, oh man, so alive! Inspired by John, I started walking barefoot part-time three years ago. There have been whole days in which I stayed barefoot, including in winter, out in the rain, or riding public transportation. It’s an exercise in awareness and in not-worrying-about-what-people-would-say. And it happens to be extremely pleasurable.

Another practice is committing to a time and a place, and going there on a regular basis. It could be the street market every Sunday, for instance. Plan your meals, interact with the fruit sellers, watch people, taste fresh foods, enjoy life.

Or go to Starbucks frequently and use it as an office, for creative work or for office work. You can go to the same café many times in a row, or to a different café each time. Both have merits. The main thing is to go and be there, doing something again and again over weeks and months. You’ll meet people at your Starbucks office, make friends, become attached to the place and its neighborhood. And you’ll get your work done. How different is it from going to a corporate job and sitting in a cubicle looking at a computer screen? Perhaps it’s the same thing; or perhaps the cubicle can become the same thing—that is, a practice—provided that you find the attitude that transforms a constraint, imposed by circumstances, into a commitment you choose to make, with the result of your becoming alert and present.

Spiritual practice takes a thousand shapes. Here’s one: going to church every week, or perhaps most days, or perhaps every day, or perhaps twice a day. One of my devout friends calls the institution of the church a vessel for his spirituality.

My friend considers that there is no spirituality without a vessel. Dwelling in the vessel is a practice, whether the vessel is material (a building) or symbolic (a paradigm and an institution). Perhaps it’s the practice that matters, rather than the vessel. Or perhaps the vessel counts for something. All I know is that entering temples, cathedrals, chapels, and basilicas, in Paris and in my travels, is always transformative. I wonder what would happen if I did it every day, without exception.

A lifetime commitment to the church is, of course, a very formal and deep practice. Other spiritual practices are more informal. Some formalists pooh-pooh the informalists. But that's OK; the informalists pooh-pooh the pooh-pooh.

Moving toward simplicity.

You can practice a simple exercise, returning to it often and over a span of years. In sports there are many such exercises: the golf swing, the free throw in basketball, the rope skipping of a boxer. Here’s a kind of warm-up stretch. Sit on the floor, with legs bent; bring the soles of your feet together, and hold your feet with your hands; try to lower your knees until they touch the floor; now lean your trunk forward. Do it once or twice, and it comes across as an uncomfortable and possibly useless exercise. But do this one stretch every day for twenty-five years, and you might discover all sorts of dimensions, to the exercise and to yourself as you respond to the exercise.

The form of your practice—yoga, Tai Chi, tango—might be very important . . . or not. After all, every form has its enlightened practitioners and its zombies. Shadow boxing could be as integrative as an ancestral martial art. Air guitar? You bet. “Star Wars” lightsaber play-acting? Of course. The main thing is to commit to the practice and to do it with all your heart.

And then there’s the practice of a creative skill, whether you do it professionally or for pleasure alone. A drawing a day, for instance—fast or slow, as you wish; take thirty seconds or thirty minutes. Choosing pencils, sharpening them, leafing through a sketchbook, translating the swirling images of a street corner into arm and hand gestures that make marks on paper . . . if you think about it, the act is by no means banal. It’s transformative in many ways. Do it steadily over days and months, and something will get reorganized inside yourself: the way you look at the world, the way you absorb and interpret information, the way you pay attention.

The practice is primary, the skill secondary; or, to put it differently, it’s only by practicing that you gain the skill. You might want to say, “But I don’t know how to draw!” Sure, sure. That’s why you practice, you dummkopf!

A smartphone and an Instagram account, and—hey, presto! You can practice photography. Publish crappy photos of pizza slices if that’s your thing. Or develop the art of perceiving, thinking, and deciding. Photography is the reason or excuse (or vessel) to open up your mind and heart.

Walking, going to the market, stopping at Starbucks, visiting a monument, taking photos with your smartphone . . . Is there any difference between practice and life?

Nah. Life is an Integrated Practice.

© 2016, Pedro de Alcantara

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Three Meditations on Rhythm & Flow

Three Meditations on Rhythm & Flow

An excerpt from my work-in-progress The Integrated Writer

(and you can read it too, even if you aren't a writer!)

Timing is everything. But what is timing? It's a sort of synching of body, mind, space, and time. Find your rhythm, and things will flow. Here are some ways for you to practice the art of synching . . . and feeling good in your life and in your work.

First Meditation: You’re the Task

Choose a time-consuming and attention-demanding household task: cleaning the living room and kitchen after a big party; washing, drying, ironing, and folding several laundry loads; sorting through a year’s worth of tax receipts; writing letters, postcards, and e-mails to two dozen correspondents. The aim of the game is for you to undertake the task in an even mood, clear-headed and constructive, taking as much time as you need to accomplish the whole task without doing dumb things—breaking a glass, putting a new red skirt with a load of whites, mistakenly throwing away an important bank statement, stuffing the wrong letter inside an addressed envelope.

If you rush, you make mistakes. If you drag, you lose interest. How to avoid both?

Spread your attention so that you keep many things in mind at the same time: the task itself, with its many requirements; the environment of time and space, be it kitchen, basement laundry room, or office desktop; and, most important of all, your own self, your physicality in back, legs, and arms, breath, sight, hearing, touch.

Let’s say you’re hand-washing two dozen crystal glasses which you really, really don’t want to break. Normally you take a glass, dump its contents down the drain, soap it, rinse it, put it on the rack, then dry it and put it away. In this meditation you take a glass in your hands and immediately notice the feeling of the stem against your fingers, and also the feeling of your fingers as they wrap the stem. Beyond your fingers you feel your whole hand, your wrist, your arm; you turn the glass to empty it into the sink, and you marvel at the mobility of your arm, how its parts are at the same time independent yet connected. You sense how the arm belongs together with the shoulder, the shoulder with the back, the back with the pelvis and legs; holding a glass, turning it, emptying it are all gestures of your whole body. Every little motion of your hand is a pleasure, an adventure, a discovery. Every glass you wash is a celebration of your whole self. The task becomes amazingly agreeable; you feel as if you could wash glasses for the rest of your life. And you end up accomplishing the task perfectly.

The more experienced you become in being attentive to yourself as you perform a task, the less time you’ll need to perform the task. But to get there you’ll need trust, faith and perseverance. It’s not easy to believe that taking time to be centered is the most time-saving device there is.                       

Second Meditation: More Reception, Less Acquisition

Choose a museum or art gallery to visit. Ideally you’d go to a fine museum showing a first-rate, must-see temporary exhibit: a Cézanne retrospective, a big Brancusi display, something bold and ambitious and exciting, spread over a large surface encompassing several rooms, perhaps two floors or more.

Enter the exhibit and walk through it at a steady pace, unhurried but also unhesitant. Do several rounds of the whole show, and visit an individual room again and again if you wish. But you must never stop walking, never plant yourself in front of a painting or sculpture, never study something up close or in detail. Take in the whole environment, the gallery’s architecture, the way natural and artificial light intermingle to illuminate the artworks, the smell of floor wax and turpentine. Watch the museumgoers, the couples, the bored children, the horny man stalking a young woman who obviously attends art school, the guards sitting at their stools with walkie-talkies hanging from their belts. See the paintings as well, note their shapes and colors, the way they occupy the walls. And don’t stop walking, ever. Stay a good hour inside the galleries, walking, watching, perceiving.

The object of the game is flow plus observation: taking in everything without letting yourself being drawn in by anything; developing an open mind, observant, attentive, mildly discerning but not acquisitive, dispassionate and disinterested—and therefore tremendously astute. In this game, the flow of locomotion and observation becomes more important than attachment, analysis, detail, all those traits of an acquisitive mind that wants to own something for itself by discerning and judging. Let it all be, let it all go; not through indifference, but through detachment.

Needless to say, the writer in you can then approach every writing task with the same mind. The flow of stimulation is permanent; the desire to acquire, to judge, to control is permanent; the duty to keep the mind open is permanent. But instead of acquiring, judging, and controlling, your observant and equitable mind lets everything go by.

After you finish the meditation at the museum, take a break, visit the museum’s coffee shop, have a little caffeine and sugar; then return to the exhibit and look closely at a few of the artworks. Love some, hate others, imagine what it’d be like to live in a big downtown loft full of exquisite Brancusis. Then go home and write.

Third Meditation: Organize Slowly, Execute Quickly

 Make a sizable shopping list, including a variety of items such as fresh and canned foods, paper goods, toiletries, and so on—let’s say your family’s need for a whole week. Go to a supermarket you’ve never been to, even if you have to drive out of your way. With your shopping list in hand, walk through the supermarket without a cart, not taking anything in your hands, but just finding out where everything is and making choices of brand, flavor, and quantities for every item on your list. In other words, stake out the new supermarket and get to know it, taking as much time as you need to locate and ponder every item you need. After you’ve made every single one of your shopping decisions, envision a one-way route thought the isles, without ever backtracking. Now take a shopping cart and execute every decision without hesitation, without changing your mind, without adding new items or leaving any behind: bam-bam-bam-bam-BOOM. The purpose of the exercise is to become able to make a comprehensive plan—however long it takes to make it—and to execute it unflinchingly, and as fast as you can,        

There will be plenty of times in your life, both as a writer and otherwise, when the planning/executing skill will come in handy. For instance, you’re researching a big project and you need to look at some materials at a library out of town. You can only spare two hours there, on your way to your in-laws’ for Thanksgiving dinner. If you know how to plan (which may take a long time) and how to execute (which may take no time at all) then you can make the best use of a difficult situation and optimize the resources at your disposal.

The meditation covers both strategy and tactics. (Strategy comes from the Greek strategia, meaning “generalship.” Tactics comes from the Greek taktikos, meaning “ordered, arranged.”) Strategy is all about establishing priorities and long-term goals. Tactics are the best moves to achieve your strategy. Although time is flexible and can be made to appear lengthy, in the end we all have a limited amount of time on this earth. Strategic and tactical skills create extra time to live, to work, and to enjoy your earthly existence.

Once you get good at planning and implementing a plan, you don’t have to be rigid about it. In the meditation I propose that you execute your shopping plan unflinchingly, without backtracking, without revising your decisions. It’s a good skill to develop. But in most tasks of daily life, to revise decisions is both needed and healthy. In other words, become good at being firm, become good at being flexible.

© 2015, Pedro de Alcantara

The Spinning Stool

On a recent trip to New York City, I visited the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Museum Design, up on Fifth Avenue along Central Park. The museum is a compact place featuring many delights for anyone interested in design, engineering, architecture, visual arts, communication, and information.

I started on the third (and top) floor, where I saw a temporary exhibition celebrating the creative accomplishments of Heatherwick Studio, a London-based design and architecture firm. Then I went to the second floor, the highlight of which was the Immersion Room, a sort of wraparound, room-size toolbox in which you can design and digitally display your own wallpaper. Then I descended to the first floor, where another temporary exhibition led you through a series of brilliant posters from decades past, showing you how poster artists use “principles of composition, perception and storytelling to convey ideas and construct experiences” (in the museum’s words).

By then I had already had any number of uplifting and enlightening experiences, but the basement remained to be explored. There I found a strange object, a cross between a stool and a spinning top made of hard plastic (or, to get technical, “rotationally molded polyethylene”). Created by those accomplished fellows from the Heatherwick Studio, this “spinning stool,” so to speak, is wobbly by design. You sit on it quite low, with your butt and most of your back cocooned against the stool’s inner curves. Then you lift your feet off the floor and . . . and the thing starts wobbling, with you in it. Meaning, YOU start wobbling in space, seemingly out of control, seemingly in danger of falling off and breaking your neck.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the famous five stages of loss and grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. What’s interesting about these stages is how dynamic they are; they imply change, movement, and finally growth.

Riding the wobbly spinning stool, I felt myself passing through four stages. They weren’t similar to the actual stages of loss and grieving, but they were certainly dynamic—and, like the stages of loss and grieving, they involved strong emotions.

First stage: “I don’t wanna do this. It looks unsafe. I was never any good at sports. I’ll fall, people will laugh, everyone will know I’m a pathetic old fool.”

Second stage: “Okay, I’m doing it. How does it work? Wow, it’s so low. And if I take my feet off the floor . . .? Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod! Someone, stop this! Pleeease, let me out!”

Third stage: “Hey, it’s kinda nifty. It kinda feels nice. You can kinda control it with just a little sway of the hips. Hmmm . . .  groovy . . . hmmm . . . it reminds me of Woody Allen having sex with the Orb in ‘Sleeper’ . . . hmmm . . ."

“Hmmm . . . was it the Orb or the Orgasmatron? Hmmm . . .”

When I stood up from the Orgasmatron—I mean, the wobbly spinning stool—I noticed that my whole body felt loose and energized, as if I had just had a session with a skilful sacrocranial osteopath. In fact, the spinning stool had healed me from the feelings I had before I sat on it—my feelings of fear and inadequacy.

Fourth stage: “I love the spinning stool. Let me wobble again. I could wobble all day. I’m good at it, and it’s good to me! I’m so full of love I could kiss that guard standing by the door over there!”

Two Japanese women entered the room while I was enjoying my spin. One of them sat cautiously on another stool. It wobbled a little bit, and she panicked big time. She let out a heartbreaking yelp, and her friend helped her get off the stool. That was it for the two of them. Let’s get the heck out of this spinning room! Sayonara, Cooper-Hewitt!

I felt for them.

We all have our blocks, our fears, our habits and compensations, our pains, our preconceived ideas . . . our hatreds. A new tool (or a person or an idea) enters our lives. Our first perception of the tool is that it’s a threat, a danger, a horror. Then we employ the tool with our habitual fears, we respond awkwardly to the situation, and the tool seemingly confirms our perception of its dangers: it hurts us, it humiliates us, it . . . it makes us wobble uncontrollably.

When handling the tool (or person or idea) that carries potential solutions to our problems, we tend to get stuck in the first stage, where we’re so deeply triggered by our habits that we don’t even see the tool. Instead, we see in it a projection of our fears.

And yet, this tool (or person or idea) happens to be the solution to our problems; it heals our fears and dissipates our hurts, and it makes us feel really, really good.

Let’s call the four stages fear, exploration, practice, and love. The passage from one to the other requires courage and determination. Along the way, there are many possibilities for things to go not to your liking—that is, for things to go wrong according to your subjective assessment, perhaps so wrong that you’ll feel justified in quitting. But if you stick it out . . . you’ll want to kiss the guard.

Symbolically speaking, of course.

Or literally speaking. It’s your call!

[And if you’re curious about the five stages of grief and loss, here’s an infographic.]