Repeat after me!

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

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

Adapted from etymonline.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

look for a while longer, look and stay looking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pleasure, integration, paradise.

Pleasure, integration, paradise.

Pleasure, integration, paradise.

Pleasure, integration, paradise!

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

The Ten Laws of Preparation

The other day one of my talented and motivated students asked me to help her prepare a presentation. This got me thinking, and I came up with The Ten Laws of Preparation. Notice the definite article: THE Ten Laws. Absolutes are Ridiculous. Let’s go!

1. Everyone is different. No two people will prepare in the exact same manner. What works for me may kill you. Is that what you want? To die? Prepare for it! In your own way!

2. Don’t be an idiot. Generally speaking, people don’t retain much information from presentations. Instead they react to the presenter, to the environment, to the other people in the room. Impressions, feelings, sensations, and emotions; participants “like it” or they “don’t like it.” It means that you can give a successful presentation by being pleasant or entertaining or remarkable in some way—regardless of the materials you present.

3. Okay, let’s suppose that you want to present something meaningful, besides displaying your quirky personality. Then your presentation needs a minimum of structure. The type of structure, its complexity, and its design will vary tremendously from presentation to presentation, according to (1) the personality of the presenter, (2) the materials in question, (3) the circumstances, and (4) Mysterious Magma Flowing Through Your Innards. We’ll talk about structure some other day, but for now let’s state that SOME structure tends to be better than NO structure, and TOO MUCH structure is as problematic as NO structure.

4. Presentation Mechanics: slides, materials, objects, technology. I attended a big conference a couple of years ago. Every presenter but one projected slides on a big screen, sometimes of images only and sometimes text only. You know, the usual power-point thingy, frequently lacking in “power” and often not having a “point.” Many images were low-fidelity reproductions from the Internet. A single presenter, who happened to be a Zen teacher, simply talked to the crowd of about two hundred people. It was quite a contrast: heart, brain, and voice shared directly with the listeners, without the intermediation of images or text. The main thing, though, is to have a notion of why and how you’re going to use technology. If your why and how are good, your technology is good! And remember law #1: people are different. Power Point has friends (some of you) and enemies (some of me).

5. Redundancy (extra materials, short version, long version). Your presentation should be like an accordion, capable of expanding and contracting. I once attended a workshop for which the presenter (the accordion) was contracted, so to speak; she only had about ten minutes of material for a one-hour presentation. After she ran out of things to share (air), she stood there, silent and forlorn (deflated). I took over and continued the presentation for her, improvising a number of fine exercises on the excellent theme that she had proposed. Yes, “I inflated my accordion, uninvited.” But, hey! It was either me or Forlorn Deflation.

6. What if several participants don’t show up? What if the computer cables fail completely? What if the dog ate your homework? In my early adolescence (technically in my puberty, also known as Acne Horribilis), I found myself taking part in a kids’ program on a rinky-dink TV station. On that occasion I was going to play the recorder, after which I was going to play the cello. Cute! In front of the camera, I opened my recorder box. And to my surprise and horror the instrument wasn’t there. It was on my bed, at home, far, far away, out of reach, in Planet Crapyourpants. I quickly closed the empty box and announced, to the camera and to the world (meaning the three or four people watching the show in their homes), “Actually, I think it’d rather play the cello only. It’ll be more interesting.” (Or words to that effect. It has been fifty years since that acne-aggravating event.) It’s better not to assume that everything will go according to plan. Checking things a million times can help, but—no, what really helps is to be adaptable.

7. Psychological Preparation. Feeling good feels better than feeling bad. And the better you feel, the better you present! Beans, beans, the magical fruit! Ahead of your presentation, during it, and afterward, rely on every tool at your disposal to feel good about yourself, and also your materials, your audience, your friends, your colleagues, your family, your neighbors, your pets, your manicurist, and your psychiatrist.

8. Experience is “accumulated preparation,” and preparation is “accumulated experience.” One of my college mentors is a brilliant pianist and musicologist. He’s given thousands of concerts, plus tens of thousands of lessons and seminars and lectures. He was a child prodigy to begin with, and now he’s a professor at Harvard (emeritus). In one of our recent encounters, he told me that it has been many years since he last gave a lecture from notes. Instead, he talks a blue streak in any of three languages according to the needs of the house. He knows his stuff inside out, he’s comfortable with the limelight, he has merited the right to a high opinion of himself, and—well, People Are Very Different One From The Other. But over time, you can kinda relax about preparation and rely on . . . on a high opinion of yourself, maybe. Earn it, though!

9. Trust and faith. The materials, the mechanics, the outfit you wear: important. But having a sense, deep in yourself, that things will work out, that you’ll survive, that people are there for you and not against you, that the History of Humanity Since Time Immemorial is Full of Forgiven and Forgotten Over-Prepared and Under-Prepared Presentations, that the Skies Above Will Grant You Insights That You Didn’t See Coming Until You Found Yourself on Stage . . . “go present, and you’ll receive a present.”

10. “Nine jokes and one insight are much better than nine insights and one insult.” You know who said this, don’t you? Goethe, of course. In “Der Neue Speedy Gonzales” (1833) he wrote that “nueve chistes y una revelación son mucho mejores que nueve revelaciones y un insulto.” ¡Por supuesto!*

*Genau!

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

Three Lifestyles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not the same love, is it?

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

Ah, irresistible.

Freud image by Evgeny Parfenov.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a superpower.

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

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

How to become perfect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything is an intermediate step to something else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Perfection is the acceptance of imperfection.

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

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

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

The Other Helicopter

A little while ago I posted a paragraph on LinkedIn. It was part of a weekly series I’ve been doing this year, using photos that I’ve taken in the Place des Vosges to illustrate the symbolic dimensions of life, with a little metaphysics and some humor thrown into the mix.

A friendly connection on LinkedIn reached out to me. He was puzzled by my post. “What does all of this refer to, Pedro?”

Ah. Yes. Right.

Thanks to my friendly connection, I got thinking about the nature of communication, about ways of seeing the world and ways of talking about it, about potentially incomprehensible things that—that, well, we don’t comprehend and that leave us baffled, puzzled, or worse.

Here’s the photo that illustrates my post.

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 And here’s my original post.

 52 Mondays #31: August 2, Levitation
 
We can fly. Perhaps not very high and not for very long, but we leave the ground and we move up and away. We fly! No planes needed, no air traffic controllers, no airports, no duty free; just legs and life. Some of us get really good at it—Cristiano Ronaldo, for instance, can fly more than seven meters aboveground and hover for as long as five minutes. And some of us get so good, but so good at it that we fly to the moon and back, at the speed of light, without leaving our armchairs. This technique, which is called “esplodere in testa,” was developed by Leonardo da Vinci in 1519, building on Dante’s “elicottero dell'anima” from around 1321. Ultimately, it’s very simple: sit, close your eyes, and fly, fly, fly!

Your feet literally leave the ground when you run, jump, or skip. It’s what my photo shows: a boy running, his feet not touching the ground. The boy isn’t flying the same way that a Boeing 787 flies from Charles de Gaulle to JFK. But, look! His feet aren’t touching the ground! So, he’s kinda flying, just a little bit, don’t you see! I’m using my snapshot to trigger a sort of head trip. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could fly without wings, with the power of our feet and legs and mind . . .”

The post starts with a brief affirmative statement: We can fly. Sure: using planes, gliders, helicopters, rockets, maybe a jetpack, a parachute, a trampoline. Or by jumping from a burning building to a safe net provided by the firemen below. There are many actual technical ways for humans to fly. My affirmative statement, however, risks creating confusion, because I’m not talking primarily about physical flight. I’m talking about the feeling of flying that we get from dreams, or from surprising experiences in daily life when the excitement of a discovery (or a breakthrough, or some good news, or the solution to a longstanding problem) gives you a high. If you’re high, you’re symbolically flying!

I have a deep dislike of airport duty-free shops. I consider them toxic and perverse. Airport design forces you to walk through the shops and breathe in the allergy-inducing odors of perfume. Shady billionaires who stay out of public view profit mightily from their grip on duty-free shopping. In my post I made a passing reference to duty free as a way of saying that “ideal flying” is different from “habitual flying.” Ideally, you’d “fly free” instead of “duty free.” In this context, duty free becomes a representation of all that’s wrong with commercialism, greed, tobacco pushers, profiteers, tax cheaters, and—“Pedro, calm down. Fly free instead of duty free. We get it!”

IMG_9337 (1).jpg

Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese soccer player, is one of the greatest athletes of all time. Among other things, he can jump quite high. On YouTube his jumps are often depicted in slow motion, and then it looks as if he's jumping super-high and staying aloft for a long time: he’s flying! In my LinkedIn post I take his ability and exaggerate it: seven meters high, five minutes long, wow. Exaggeration is a lie, but the lie hints at the symbolic truth of perception, imagination, and possibility. Subsequently I took one of Ronaldo’s jumping goals and created a little remix, with my own soundtrack. Now we have exaggeration and distortion in a multimedia setting, at the service of metaphysics. The soundtrack hypnotizes you, the images beguile you, and you become a true believer: “Human flying, with no jetpack, no nothing! I’ve seen it with these very eyes!”

Cristiano Ronaldo is a brilliant innate talent, and he works extremely hard at maintaining and improving his athletic skills. In his own way, he flies admirably. But what about us, average men and women with the character defect of being disembodied introverted intellectuals, unfit and lazy and—hey, we can fly too! Because the kind of flying we’re talking about is an activity of the imagination. And the imagination is the most powerful of all human attributes. We imagine problems (we’re really good at it!) and we imagine solutions (we’re pretty decent at it!). We imagine fears, situations, conversations, relationships, theories, friends, enemies, gods, and devils; we imagine a whole universe. And if we imagine our own flight, up we go: to the moon and back, at the speed of light.

The Leonardo and Dante remarks are jokes that also play the role of “labyrinth entry points.” Leonardo was supremely creative. And a creative spark sometimes feels like an explosion in your head. I Google-translated the expression “explode in the head” into Italian, and "esplodere in testa" was born. I added the date of Leonardo’s death, 1521, which possibly is another joke—maybe Leonardo died from his exploding testa. Or maybe he was already dead when he invented this remarkable creative technique.

Leonardo_da_Vinci_helicopter.jpeg

Leonardo worked as a military engineer for one of his patrons. It appears that he also designed a sort of pioneering theoretical helicopter, which centuries later would inspire aspects of modern aeronautics. Through a process of free association, the expression "helicopter of the soul" came to my mind while I was day-dreaming about Leonardo. I Google-translated it, and now we have the famous “elicottero dell'anima,” which didn’t exist until I imagined it.

But I decided to assign this invention not to the Leonardo of my imagination, but to the Dante of my imagination. Dante’s La Divina Commedia leads the reader through the passage or ascent from hell to heaven, perhaps the ultimate flight. As with my Leonardo joke, I chose to refer to the year of Dante’s death, 1321. Thanks to it a metaphysically inclined person might get thinking about death, eternity, and all that. Also, isn’t 1321 a lovely number in itself? Say it out loud: one-three-two-ONE! Numerology. Gematria. The Kabbalah. Numbers are wonderful triggers of symbolic speculation, or “labyrinth entry points.” You know . . . the labyrinth of the imagination. The Labyrinth of Life.

Incidentally, I know very little about Leonardo and Dante (or the Kabbalah or gematria). My jokes don’t demonstrate that I’m erudite; they demonstrate that I’m silly. But Wikipedia is there for you to visit and explore. All you need is a first step: “Dante,” for instance. His Wikipedia page has dozens of hyperlinks to other pages, each of which has dozens of hyperlinks to other pages, each of which . . . You’ll esplodere in testa, mamma mia! You can also attempt to read Divina Commedia, in the original or in translation. Life is short, though Dante is eternal. “La vita è breve, ma Dante è eterno.”

I concluded my LinkedIn paragraph with a brief statement. Paraphrasing and plagiarizing George Bernard Shaw, let me quote myself, to spice up the conversation: “Ultimately, it’s very simple: sit, close your eyes, and fly, fly, fly!” This is an abbreviated affirmation of the power of the imagination.

My original paragraph has less than 150 words. My explanation of what I tried to pack into it is ten times longer. The German word for “poet” is Dichter, which comes from Dichte, “density.” The poet condenses language and makes a few words say a lot of things. The language of the symbolic dimension, of metaphor and metaphysics, is necessarily distinct from the language of the material world, of technique and physical facts.

A helicopter manual reads very differently from La Divina Commedia.

To the materially inclined, metaphor seems incomprehensible (and probably reprehensible too). But We The Imaginatively Inclined, we need, we need—we need!—exaggeration, distortion, lies, jokes, allusions, ambiguity, neologisms, fake erudition, uncredited paraphrases, free association, non sequiturs, ad hoc, pro bono, and lies. And jokes. It’s our attempt at grasping the ungraspable, which according to Dante “è la cosa più importante nella vita.”

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©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

Baby Drives a Stick Shift!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sigmund, sing your song!

“Das Ding muss nicht du sein,

und du musst nicht das Ding sein.”

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

  1. Your mind plays a role.

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

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

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

  5. Not every numbered list is useful.

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

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

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

Rooted

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

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Okay!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

The Stone and the Stoned

Dumb guy, never changes his mind.

Silly guy, changes his mind all the time.

Hello, my name is Pedro!

One way of understanding a human being is to get a sense of how much he or she changes opinions, over what subjects, with what intensity, how quickly or slowly, how often. We all know someone who seems never, ever to change opinions, attitudes, and habits . . . stone brain in a granite body. And we all know someone whose opinions and attitudes are like fruit flies over a pile of compost. Flit, flit, flit, flitz blitz I’m at the end of my wits I call it quits!

I moved to Paris in 1990, and I’ve lived here since. During my first few years, I busied myself researching and drafting my book Indirect Procedures: A Musician’s Guide to the Alexander Technique. Circumstances favored me, and the book was nicely published by Oxford University Press in 1997. In 1994, my French colleague Annie Moteï was contacted by a French publisher who wanted to add a book on the Alexander Technique to his catalogue. Annie wasn’t interested, but knowing that I was happily absorbed in the process of writing she recommended me to the publisher.

The guy, Monsieur Dangles, sent me a letter and a proposal.

As Jimmy Stewart would have said, “Wait a minute!” I mean, my French was rudimentary. Prepositions! Conjugations! Vocabulary! Idiomatic expressions that didn’t make any sense! I think some Parisians would have considered my French back then as nothing but “lingerie de foie gras.”

I accepted M. Dangles’s proposal.

What did I have to lose, other than sleep, my reputation, and the good will of the Gallic nation? I put a book together, writing it in quasi-French. A polyglot student of mine generously helped me translate it into quasi-actual-French, and the resulting book, La Technique Alexander: Principes et Pratiques, was published in 1997 and has stayed in print ever since, liberté, égalité, fraternité.

I then set to rewrite the book in English. Not simply translate it from the quasi-almost-give-or-take-a-fromage-or-three French, but re-think it, write it differently, change my mind about it. The resulting book, The Alexander Technique: A Skill for Life, was published by Crowood Press in 1999, and it also stayed in print continuously until just about now.

Two very different books, representing two very different attitudes. Thanks to the Warm-Hearted Doorman Above (“le mec qui habite au Pôle Nord, quoi”), I had grown a little while grappling with the French book, and I managed to write a somewhat better book in English (quasi).

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Some years later, a Japanese colleague who appreciated my writing wanted to translate A Skill for Life into Japanese. “Wait a minute!” I decided to re-read Skill and revise it before the colleague translated it. Ay ay ay ouch! I had changed my mind a fair amount over time, and I now found Skill awkward, to use a euphemism, or awk-awk-awk, to use an onomatopoeia. Let’s not use an expletive. I revised it, my colleague translated it, and the book came out in 2011 thanks to the handiwork of Hitomi Ono, Fumiko Katagiri, and Yoshi Kazami. Soon after, colleagues from Estonia also wanted to translate it, and so they did, using the newly revised text. Alexanderi Tehnika: Oskus Kogu Eluks came out in 2012. I owe this pleasure to Conrad Brown, Karen Brown, and Kristel Kaljund.

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Estonian is a non-Indo-European language. It doesn’t share much (or anything at all) with French, English, Portuguese, German, or—well, it shares a little with Finnish. To make a long story short, when I read my own book in Estonian I don’t understand a word of it, analphabète diplômé, Bachi-bouzouk de tonnerre de Brest!

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About 18 months ago, my friendly friends at Crowood Press reached out to me and said, “Wait a minute!” They said, “Hey Pedro wanna rewrite A Skill for Life? Because, Pedro, this book of yours is more than 20 years old, and, Pedro, perhaps you have changed a little over the decades? Or so we hope? To be or not to be?”

I was very grateful for their initiative and support. I rewrote the thing. I kept some stuff and burned the rest in a symbolic pyre. The new book is now out. It’s titled The Alexander Technique: A Skill for Life, completely rewritten and revised and the fellow changed his mind, not that he’s become perfect by any means. Far from it. 144 pages, 50 illustrations.

This book and any other book probably should exist in an oral version only, where every day the writer, having learned and grown, tells it differently, tells it more wisely and more entertainingly, tells it with a little uncertainty and a little distance: “Today it’s like this. Tomorrow, who knows! Qui sait, bougre d'extrait de cornichon!” (This last expression is Estonian for “bougre de zouave d'anthropopithèque.”)

In the absence of the metamorphic oral version, you might be interested in ordering the print version, or the Kindle version which you can download IMMEDIATELY. But hurry! I’m at the risk of changing my mind and writing some other book!!

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

The Universe and the Yamaha

The other day I finished writing my piano method, and I sent it off to my editor at Oxford University Press: 450 pages, about 150 compositions, 45 video clips, three jokes. If all goes well, the book will go into production and be published in—nobody knows when. Editing and publishing take time. Placeholder publication date (I mean, I’m just making this up): December 24, 2022.

What’s the method’s philosophy?

It’s a quaternity—that is, a group of four principles.

1. Acknowledge the Universe. It doesn’t take much; it’s enough to listen to the rain, or smile at a passerby, or eat a banana. A supply chain involving dozens of steps and hundreds of people made sure that the banana would arrive in my hands at the exact moment when I’d be hungry and looking for something delicious, nutritious, and fun to eat. That’s the Universe at work, and I’m terribly grateful to it, or It. Capitalize The Important Stuff, Okay?

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Suppose you sit at a piano, an upright Yamaha. Designed in Japan, built in Indonesia, shipped to France, delivered to your living room in your second-floor walk-up in Paris. Supply chain, right? But the piano embodies more than that. With only a few hyperlinks, you can go from your Yamaha to anywhere in the world and in the history of humanity, or Humanity. Japan, Indonesia, engineering, math, music, piano, pianists, Beethoven, Liberace. Or Yamaha, motorbike, Hell’s Angels, angels, hell. Or Japan, sushi, the first time I ate sushi, age 17, back in Brazil where my then cello teacher-mentor and now favorite adoptive older brother Barney took me to a perfect hole-in-the-wall sushi bar at the heart of Liberdade, the Japanese neighborhood in downtown São Paulo.

From Wikipedia:

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Liberdade was known as Campo da Forca (Field of the Gallows) until the late 19th century, and was an area reserved for the execution of slaves and convicts. Death was considered the only path to liberty (liberdade) for slaves. The condemned were led to the Igreja Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte (Church of Our Lady of Good Death) to perform a final prayer for a rapid and painless death. The church remains on Rua do Carmo at the corner of Rua Tabatinguera. Slaves and other convicts were executed in the Largo da Forca (Gallows Square), the public square now known as Praça da Liberdade. Cemitério dos Aflitos (Cemetery of the Afflicted) was created in 1774 to bury executed slaves, those who had committed suicide, and others who could not be interred elsewhere.

This story lives in my Yamaha upright, together with all stories ever told. Play one note at the piano, one single note, and you’ll tell all stories, if only you’re alert to the workings of the Universe and grateful to It.

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2. It’s your own self sitting at the piano, your own sweet self, your childhood and adolescence and adulthood sweet self, your butt self, your brain self. A Unique Human Being who, as it happens, represents All Humans in the Universe, because a simple chain of cause and effect connects you to everyone else, living, dead, and yet unborn. You’re sitting at the piano with your needs and wants, your strengths and weaknesses, your hopes and fears, your Inner Monkey and your Inner Banana From The Martinique Of The Imagination. You can’t play any one note at your Yamaha without Peeling the Banana. Have you ever listened to a pianist in Banana Denial? It’s painful. My method doesn’t explicitly talk about the Banana per se, but it invites you to be constantly alert to the workings of your inner self as you play The One Note That Tells All Stories.

3. Your butt and your brain, which are The Center Of The (Known) Universe, are confronted with a creative situation. Play a note. Play this specific note. Play this chord. Now invent the next chord. Play these eight bars. Now transpose them to a different key. Play loud, play soft. Play without looking at your hands. Play faster, play slower. Play All Stories, andante moderato. The creative stimulation may come from my method, from pieces written by other composers, from your own imagination. It doesn’t matter; what matters is that you’re being presented, again and again, with a creative situation that invites a creative response. Peeling The Banana Is a Creative Undertaking.

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4. And now that you’ve said hello to the Universe, and hello to your Sweet Self, and hello to the Creative Situation, you can start fashioning your response. Orientation in space, timing, direction, meaning, reactions, choices, decisions, thoughts, emotions, thumbs and pinkies. Thumbs And Pinkies Are The Squiggly Bits That The Universe Uses To Peel the Banana With, or what most musicians call “technique.”

 Let’s Post-It-fy the quaternity at the core of my method.

  1. The Universe.

  2. You.

  3. The creative situation.

  4. Your creative response, fashioned.

Incidentally, this is a life principle. It applies to every endeavor, not just playing the piano. Uh-oh—I feel a surge of capitalizing coming on. Life Is You, At The Center Of The Universe, Responding To A Creative Situation And Fashioning Your Destiny, Banana!

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©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

Project Management for Babies

My wife knows me. That makes sense, right? I mean, she can tell when I’m squirming, or floundering, or squiggling, or threshing, or prevaricating, or gerrymandering, even if I’m sitting still and looking relatively normal. The other day she saw that something was afloat, or sinking, or—Pedro, leave the Thesaurus alone and tell me what’s going on.

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I’ve been working on a piano method for four years, and it’s now under contract, with a deadline. Concepts, exercises, compositions, video clips. Did I tell you that the project is big? I explained to my wife that, besides everything else, I couldn’t choose among a number of solutions for a structural problem deep inside the project. I tried to describe the problem and some of its solutions, and my wife bypassed the intricacies and diagnosed my condition: “You’re suffering labor pains.”

The light bulb went on, the penny dropped, and the dog wagged its tail. Thanks to my wife I had understood the biological and symbolic dimension of project management. It’s called “conception, gestation, delivery.”

Before you become attuned to the possibility of a project, it exists on an immaterial plane out of reach of your intellectual grasp. Let’s call it “God’s imagination,” which of course is eternal and infinite. It encompasses all projects, including—for instance—performing the entire Bible as a one-man Kabuki show, or floating a horizontal Empire State Building along the Suez Canal, or eating five kilos of chocolate in one sitting just to see what happens (“apotheosis”). From that database, a project “comes to you,” often when you least expect it, sometimes catching you in a bad moment. On Saturday, May 14 2017, I was practicing the piano at Studio Bleu in central Paris, struggling to get the brain and the fingers to make friends, when I heard a voice. (I swear I did.) “Pablo, why don’t you write a piano method?” “My name is Pedro.” “Of course, my apologies. Pedro, why don’t you write a piano method?”

Conception! The project had passed from the immaterial to the brains-and-fingers, from the universal to the individual, from unimaginable to imagined. I was elated. “Thanks, Joe!” “My name is G-d.” “Of course, my apologies!”

Photo by Mônica Marcondes Machado

Photo by Mônica Marcondes Machado

Like in the baby-generating domain, project conception is an amazing and incomprehensible wonder. I immediately started getting ideas and insights about the creative processes of playing the piano. It was a revolution in my music work. I’m not saying that I suddenly started playing the piano well, only that I had found a new path to explore. I’ll be pretentious and name it “the true path.”

Then came the gestation period, the appetites (five kilos of chocolate), the morning sickness, the growth of that stranger inside you, the deep meditation. Gestation meant studying, practicing, reading, watching, practicing, sharing, teaching, learning, practicing, performing, writing, editing, revising, discarding, despairing, and marveling. If a project needs two months, it’ll take two months; if it needs four years, it’ll take four years. Mosquitos and elephants don’t have the same gestation period.

“When is it due?” According to my contract with Oxford University Press, the baby is due on April 1st (this April 1st, not next year’s; today; TODAY!). That means delivery of the final manuscript, plus supporting materials, plus blood and guts. The baby will be late. The baby is lingering and malingering inside the cocoon. The baby has structural problems that need intrauterine laser surgery. The baby enjoys inflicting labor pains upon its hapless famother (you know—the amalgamation of father and mother, Isis and Osiris, tomato and mozzarella). The baby—

I love my baby. Do I really have to let go of it?

A snapshot of Musician at the Piano, my method-in-progress.

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

The Problem Expert

We all know Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) as a poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, amateur artist, oboist, mime, short-order cook, and inventor of the Heimlich Maneuver. A hidden facet of this towering genius is a little book he published anonymously, and which survives in bootleg (“samizdat”) form. Titled Das Imaginäre Kleine Buch, Das es Nicht Gibt, the book is informally called Nichts by the connoisseurs, the cognoscenti, and the cognitively dissonant.

It’s long been a favorite of mine. I have a mimeographed copy from my days growing up under a military dictatorship in Brazil in the 60’s and 70’s. My copy is faded, smudged, torn, and illegible, but since the book is “imaginäre” the fact that I can’t read it doesn’t bother me overmuch (“zu viel,” as we say in Teutonics).

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Nichts means everything to all people, but today I’d like to highlight one of its dimensions: Goethe’s wonderful way of talking about problematics and solucionatics (or “Fanatiks und Lunatiks,” as he calls them).

Abridged and loosely translated:

  1. A problem is easier to solve if you agree to solve it (“natürlich”).

  2. Self-solve a self-created problem. While at it, self-prevent a self-problem from coming into self-existence (“Selbstachtung”).

  3. If you don’t have a problem, it’s a problem to think that you have a problem. Then the solution is to stop thinking that you have a problem. Goethe put it very elegantly: “Kein Problem.”

  4. What do you like better, the problem or the solution? It isn’t a trick question (“nein, nein!”).

  5. A deity comes to you and offers you a deal. “Pedrito mein Schnuckelschneke, mein Igelschnäuzchen, mein Honigkuchenpferd, mein Schnuckiputzihasimausierdbeertörtchen! I give you two options: I can make all your problems disappear, or I can help you become able to solve problems, one by one and in batches, using intelligence and creativity. What’s your choice?” (“¡Olé!”)

  6. You have a problem, and you feel bad that you have this problem. Then you have two problems: the thing, and your emotions about the thing—or rather, your self-judgments and self-punishments regarding the thing. Getting rid of the extra problem often solves the core problem (“das Wiener Schnitzel Paradox”).

  7. Some problems exist in the material realm, and some problems only exist in the psychic realm (“in deinem Kopf,” as Goethe used to say). That, too, is a problem!

This is the gist of Nichts. To end this post, I’d like to pay homage to Goethe by quoting from one of his beloved poems. You don’t need any German to understand it.

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©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

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Keep Track, or Lose Face!

Life is tantamount to “keeping track.” It’s a skill to be practiced and an art to be cherished.

Keep track of the days of the week. This is relatively easy. Monday ain’t Sunday. Keep track of the days of the month. A bit more difficult. I can usually tell if the month is in the tens or the twenties. But the difference between January 17 and 18, for instance, takes a finer degree of discernment when your head is busy with stuff, or as the Dutch put it, when your hoofd is bezig met dingen.

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Keep track of the members of a group. Two adults take twelve children on an excursion to a museum: six boys, six girls. You know how easy it is to forget who’s where? Distractions, excitement, queues, and now we’re down to, like, four girls and five boys. Mrs. de Alcantara, we don’t know where Pedrito is anymore. We think he sneaked out and took a Greyhound bus to Kalamazoo. He’s impossible, Mrs. de Alcantara! And he convinced two girls to flee with him!

To distract means “to draw in different directions.” To dis-tract, to dis-track, right?

Keep track of moolah, dinero, plata, dough, and spondoolics. Bank statements, receipts, subscriptions that you forgot you signed up for, automated bill payments “so convenient” that the bailiff is now inconveniently knocking on your door.

Keep track of your belongings. At the airport with no passport? ¡Ay caramba! Some years ago I took to wearing a pouch hanging from my neck when I travel: passport, debit card, a pen, earplugs. It doesn’t guarantee anything, but it lessens the likelihood that I’ll forget or misplace my passport.

Keep track of your books on your bookshelf. The other day I was able to locate my copy of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, the wonderful little volume by Shunryū Suzuki. It was exactly where it was supposed to be, in the section titled “Zen Supposes, Man Disposes.”

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Keep track of where you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going. On a material level, it’s very useful—for instance, when you’re navigating a complicated public-transport system. Have you ever taken a bus from Port Authority in New York City to the boondocks upstate? And you don’t have a ticket yet? And you’re running behind schedule? And you’re a little hypoglycemic and your acuity is leaching out of your brain and spilling all over the grungy floor? Cry, baby, cry!

But keeping track of where you are (and where you’ve been and where you’re going) also works on a metaphysical or symbolic dimension. There’s a huge difference between “being somewhere” and “going somewhere.” Keep track of “being” and “going,” and you’ll “become” in due course. You might “become Grand Central.” (Metaphysics uses a lot of quote marks. Or, as Schopenhauer often said, „Kant konnte und ich kann nicht, canuck!“*)

Keep track of your tasks and commitments. “Honey, I forgot! I just plain forgot!” Sure, sure. One more instance of your forgetfulness and this kitchen knife here will teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.

Keep track of your tasks and commitments. The music is an improvisation of mine using a flute made by Pat Haran in the style of the Native-American tradition.

Keep track of your arguments and anecdotes as you try to convince someone—your banker, for instance, or your blog readers—of something important to you. If you lose track, you lose the banker and the life-saving loan, and you lose the blog subscribers and your “face,” ouch.

Keep track of elements in a sequence. This is memory and understanding, born of attention and commitment. It could be the dance steps in a choreography, or the numbers of flats and sharps in the tonalities of the Circle of Fifths, or every word in the Illiad, which you’ll perform by heart in a forthcoming festival. It’s only 15,693 lines in dactylic hexameter. Perfectly doable if you train yourself in the art of keeping track!

By Watchduck (a.k.a. Tilman Piesk), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. With thanks!

By Watchduck (a.k.a. Tilman Piesk), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. With thanks!

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

*That’s German for the Samoan proverb, ”E le mafai Kant, ae mafai, canuck!"