Inseparable

December 29, 2018

There's no predicting how unconditional love will look & sound when it comes your way.

The Buddha and the Shadow met in a bar. One of them was resplendent, the other stank of sulfur. Jack, the bartender, knew them well. “The usual?” he asked.

“Yes,” they answered in unison. A Bloody Mary for the hairy one. And a shot of nothing, with a prāna chase, for the other fellow. Plenty of peanuts. The Buddha had a thing for crunchy-salty-nutty.

“What’s that smile about?” the Shadow asked.

“Unconditional love,” the Buddha answered. “I feel good.”

“Oh yeah? Have a look at yourself in that mirror behind the bar. You’re as fat as a Buddha, and you’re 2500 years old.”

The Buddha chuckled. “You’re right, I should lose some weight. But these peanuts . . .”

“It’s not the peanuts, Fatso. That smile of yours is just phony.”

The Buddha chucked again. It’s what he did—smile, chuckle, laugh, smile, chuckle, laugh. It drove the Shadow insane.

“Dimples are for little kids,” the Shadow said. “On you they look like leprosy.”

“Marvelous,” the Buddha chanted, beaming. “Did you know that the word ‘leprosy’ comes from the Proto-Indo-European root ‘lep’? Back then it meant ‘to peel.’”

The Shadow finished his Bloody Mary in one gulp. He banged his glass on the counter, and Jack heard it loud and clear. “You and your stupid Proto roots,” the Shadow said. “I have a PhD in linguistics. I happen to know that ‘lep’ also evolved towards the Lithuanian ‘lepus,’ which means ‘soft, weak, effeminate.’ Google it if you don’t believe me.”

“Here it is, buddy.” Jack served the Shadow his second Bloody Mary. It wasn’t going to be his last.

The Buddha smiled again. “Jack, let me have another shot of nothing.”

“Nothing!” the Shadow shouted. “That’s what’s wrong with you! You believe in nothing, you feel nothing, you do nothing! You’re dead inside!”

The Lord Buddha laughed silently, and his rolls of fat wiggled and jiggled. “Shady, I love you just so.”

The Shadow couldn’t take it any longer. “You—you—you—” He lunged at the Buddha and grabbed his throat, having temporarily forgotten that Fatso had learned karate when he dwelled in Japan.

This video was uploaded from an Android phone.

The Buddha shoved a knee into the Shadow’s groin. He collapsed on the floor, writhing in pain. Fatso stomped on his head and—well, he killed the guy.

The bar fell into a deep silence. In the distance, the church bells sounded midnight.

Jack knew the drill. He put another Bloody Mary on the counter, plus a big bowl of peanuts. In walked the resplendent Lord Buddha, smelling of sandalwood and patchouli. “Shady!” he said. “You started drinking without me. What’s bothering you?”

“Don’t even ask,” the Shadow replied, sipping his Bloody Mary. “Tonight I could murder somebody.”

The photos are from "Les Maîtres du Désordre" (The Masters of Chaos)," a show about shamanism in the Quai Branly museum in Paris that I visited in May, 2012. The soundtrack is from my CD "Songs & Soundscapes."

Look, see, love

December 2, 2018

A couple of years ago, a long-term student of mine entered my living room (which is also my teaching room) and exclaimed, “Oh, you have a mirror now!” He had noticed a body-length mirror hanging between two windows on one of the room’s walls.

I’ve lived in this apartment for about 16 years. The mirror has been on that wall since shortly after my wife and I moved in. My student took about 14 years of intermittent lessons before “he saw the mirror,” or before he was ready to see the mirror.

I tell this anecdote only to illustrate a universal truth: Our perceptions of the world are subjective and ever-changing, capable of expansion and contraction. In that moment, my student’s field of perception expanded somewhat and captured something that had been there all along.

Let the transformations take place.

Perception determines action. You perceive someone as a threat, and you act accordingly. But what if what you see isn’t really there, or what if what you don’t see is actually there? The threat might dissipate, and you react to the other person not as a foe but as a friend. Lives will be saved if you expand your field of perception. Your own life depends on it!

There are a million ways to enhance your perception, to see and hear more, to open up to the world all around you. This post is about one of those ways: Using a camera or your smartphone, choose an environment or person to document, and regularly take photos and video clips of the environment or person over two decades. Or, better still, over a lifetime.

I’ve lived in Paris for 28 years. One of my constants has been visiting the Place des Vosges. For three years I actually lived on the Place, though not with a view of it. For the past 16 years I’ve lived two blocks away from it. How many times have I walked it? I don’t know. Twice a week, on average, is plausible: there are days I go more than once, and weeks when I go most days, and weeks when I’m not in Paris. I’ll say I have walked it a thousand times, and I’ll mean it literally.

Every season; every day of the week; every hour of the day; every weather, rain and shine and snow; every mood of mine, sadness and joy, worry and gratitude. I’ve walked alone, and in company. I’ve taught there: cello lessons to a student who liked morning lessons when my downstairs neighbor wanted quiet; a breath-and-speech lesson to an Argentinian actor when roadworks made my apartment too noisy for dialogue; a couple of silent walk-lessons with a student who I felt needed to experience non-verbal communication. I’ve walked it wearing dress shoes, in sandals, barefoot.

I’ve walked it with nothing in my hands, and I’ve walked with a camera. How many shots? I really can’t know for sure. But I’ll say fifteen thousand photos, and I’ll mean it literally. Since I’ve walked the Place a thousand times, this works out to about 15 shots per walk. Not an unreasonable estimate.

The walks are . . . well, walks. Also meditations. And explorations, voyages into outer and inner space. They’re cleansing, therapeutic, inspiring. Sometimes I call the Place des Vosges my “garden of emotions.” Ask me a silly question: “Pedro, do you love the Place des Vosges?” I can’t answer right now, because I’m too busy having emotions while writing about my garden.

The Place des Vosges is, of course, a wonderful square in a wonderful city. But I believe that the meditations and explorations that it affords me could happen anywhere else: in public transportation, in other parks, in my own home, in an airplane, in any city, in any environment. If you walk around a shopping mall every day, and if you show an interest, and if you enter into the spirit of the meditation, you’ll see (and photograph, if you wish) endless marvels: windows, displays, corridors, elevators, escalators, lights, corners; plus people, people, and also a lot of people. There will be no two visits in which you’ll see the exact same shopping mall.

One day I’ll write a book about the Place des Vosges and all it has taught me over the decades. For the moment, what I want to say is that every time I walk it, I see things that I’ve never seen before—I mean, every time, every one of the thousand times I’ve walked it. This is partly because the canvas is extremely rich and detailed; partly because the Place is always changing under the changing skies; and partly because my field of perception keeps expanding. There are things I saw today, this very morning, that I was seeing for the first time, although they’ve been there—and in plain sight—forever and ever. Tomorrow I’ll go back to the Place, and walk it again, and see it anew.

We tend to conflate two events: (1) I saw something beautiful; (2) I saw something to which I was previously blind; my field of perception expanded; I found freedom and release. The conflation makes us want to exclaim, “Look! It’s so beautiful! Can’t you see? Wow!” This is an expression of the freedom and release, as much as a response to something we actually consider beautiful. Ultimately, we don’t need beautiful things to look at; we only need the passage from not-seeing to seeing. This passage, which happens totally inside our own brains (by which I mean eyes, brains, hearts, and souls), is the most beautiful of all things. The mystically minded will understand that this is a conversion or epiphany.

In February, 2012, I visited David Hockney's great art show, "A Bigger Picture," at the Royal Academy of Art in London. Among other marvels, Hockney depicts the same scene from nature in different seasons and under different weather conditions, showing how "reality" is changeable according to the light shone upon it.

UFO LANDS IN PARIS SQUARE, ABDUCTS FOREIGNER. WIFE HAPPY.

Crossing the frontier

November 3, 2018

Frontiers and passages are everywhere. We cross them a thousand times a day.

Near each frontier, there’s a territory we can call liminal. The word comes from a Latin root meaning “threshold, cross-piece, sill.”

The threshold requires your attention. It’s a place of transformation and alchemy, where you let go of one thing and embrace another.

Your home is packed with liminal territories and their delineations, which are sometimes clear, sometimes vague. Every window separates two distinct environments. The air you breathe is different on each side of the window. To open a window, to close a window, to look out of a window are liminal experiences with special sensations and emotions.

Out in the park, as well as inside your home, most days you’ll pass multiple times from sunlight to shade. The liminal territory between the two may be speckled, light and dark intermingling for your delight.

Air and water, too, are separate environments, with a fluid frontier between them. Could you live underwater, full time? Could you live without water? Could you live without ever passing between the watery world and the dry world? To dive, to resurface, to dive again: it’s life-giving and life-affirming.

Passing from the subterranean to the surface, from outside to inside, from upstairs to downstairs . . . Stairs are magical, sometimes intoxicating (a spiral staircase in a gilded palace), sometimes terrifying (dark and damp and dangerous). It doesn’t matter if it’s the “good” stairs or the “evil” stairs; passing through any staircase or stairwell is always meaningful.

Passing from a gangway to an airplane is a consequential “entering.” Air, light, sound, and smell all change noticeably. If you’re a sensitive soul, the change is dramatic. In theory, you have some control as regards how much you like or dislike any one thing. I’m suggesting you start liking the liminal experience. First, because the experience is inevitable and necessary; second, because it has powerful ritualistic and symbolic properties.

Hate flying with all your might, if you want to. Alternatively, observe the space, the interactions and personalities, the status negotiations, the infinitely fascinating planeload of humanity. Then, take off. All you have to do is to abstract the airplane, and you become Icarus. Leaving the Earth is unthinkable, impossible, incredible. And the moment of leaving, which is a liminal experience, is a death-and-rebirth of sorts.

Dawn, day, dusk, night . . . Passing from awake to asleep seems so “normal,” and yet the moment you fall asleep after a demanding day, the moment you relax, the moment you let go, the moment you enter the inner house with a thousand unexplored rooms, oh, how different, how strange, how beautiful.

Unbutton, Ye!

September 27, 2018

I often feel like a 300-pound man, ready to burst into tears of joy.

Let me explain.

About five years ago I started taking piano lessons. I’m a highly trained and experienced classical musician, but most of my training was directed toward the cello (plus music history, theory and analysis, ear training, and all the rest). Piano, not so much. Decades ago I had to take “secondary piano” in college, meaning basic training for non-piano majors. Much to my regret, the “secondary” part of it dominated my mind back then, and I paid the price. Until recently, my piano playing was awkward, insufficient, upside-down, banana-peel, and I-want-my-mommy.

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I have a wonderful piano teacher, my friend and brother Alexandre Mion. Besides the helpful lessons Alexandre has given me these past five years, I’ve also embarked on a project of my own: the development of a new piano method, designed to help a pianist—any pianist—connect with the Creative Source and become happy and healthy.

A concert pianist listening to my piano playing might think that I’m a hopeless banana-peel case. “You ain’t no Horowitz,” he or she’ll think. But I’m playing so much better than five years ago that I can barely explain how I feel about it. The 300-pound man used to weight 600 pounds. He’s still overweight and handicapped, but, wow! He’s made so much progress! He feels so much better! He’s, like, 50% unburdened! That’s a lot! Let’s shed tears of joy!

I'm done

Believe it or not, this post isn’t about my piano playing, or my piano method in development. It’s about the archetypal voyage from hurting to healing.

Let’s quote, or misquote, or paraphrase, or invent a saying, and let’s attribute it to Gustave Flaubert. “If you have survived your adolescence, you have a story to tell.” Now let’s imagine a silly-ass Zen teacher re-thinking our dear Flaubert. “If you were born, you’re hurting. Life is the hurt, and life is the healing.”

We’re all trying to figure it out, to feel good or to feel better, to shed if not pounds then resentments. Life is challenging but wonderful, wonderful but challenging. If life weren’t challenging, the following people would be out of their jobs: doctors, osteopaths, priests, psychoanalysts, nurses, preachers, surgeons, firemen, cops, lawyers, judges, prison wardens, and bakers.

The bakers: that was a joke, by the way.

The life voyage from hurting to healing is universal in its need and importance and urgency, but no two people travel in the same way. Do your brother and your sister mirror your journey? Nah. You’ve been diverging for half a century. Your stuff is unique to you, and that’s cause for celebration! Call the bakers and order a cake, gluten-free and sugar-free if you know what’s good for you.

In healing, the symbolic dimension is often stronger than the material dimension. Many years ago, I took some ballroom dance classes. A Canadian woman showed up and participated from time to time. She was a pursed-lips blonde in a man’s button-down white shirt. To my eyes, she seemed to be trying to hold it all in, afraid of looking good, afraid of the swing of life. One day in the middle of class, she unbuttoned her collar. To my eyes, it was a really big deal, as close to a striptease as she could get at that point—or ever. Healing is the healing that’s going to happen, to jerry-rig an expression. “Less fear and more love, to the extent that you can.”

It’s not possible to know what the other person is thinking and feeling, where she comes from, how she got to be the way she is. “I know exactly what you’re going through.” No, you don’t! “What you’re going through resonates with me.” Okay, that’s plausible. I may be totally wrong about that Canadian woman, but the unbuttoning—this was more than 25 years ago—has stayed in my psyche as a meaningful moment, on account of its symbolic power.

Each hurt is individual. And each healing is individual, too. For some people, piano lessons heal. For others, piano lessons hurt. For some, healing comes from doing something; for others, from stopping something. A dear person in my inner circle closed a business he had spent 20 years building up, and struggling with. Difficult as it was, the closing—which was both a letting go and an abandoning—was part of a healing processes.

When you engage in the healing process, you don’t know what the results will be. Closing a business, opening a business? Unbuttoned shirt collar? Sex-change operation? Learning to smile? It isn’t possible to know in advance. This is one of the reasons we often hesitate to get started on the healing journey: fear of the unknown. It takes courage.

The journey is akin to martial-arts training: a battle of wills between the old and the new, the bruise and the Band-Aid, the fear and the hope. As Gustave Flaubert famously didn’t say, “We’re all in it. We might as well go all in.”

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The Wizard of Chicago

August 29, 2018

During a recent visit to Chicago, I witnessed a high-caliber theatrical performance that was as troubling as it was thrilling. It took place in the subway, or the “L” as it’s called in Chicago—logically enough, since most tracks for most trains are “eLevated.” Subway is the wrong name.

But don’t let me confuse you with terminology. I was riding public transportation late in the evening, when a large, a very large black man entered my car, settled down cater-corner from me, and started his performance. He had a big voice and a big personality to go with his big body, and he wore a bright, a very bright Marlins shirt and matching baseball cap. The thing is, the Marlins aren’t a Chicago team—they’re based in Miami. And somehow the bright shirt from the wrong team contributed to the performance’s hypnotic power.

Let’s call the big Marlins guy "Merlin," since he was quite the wizard. Speaking loudly enough for the entire car to hear him, Merlin invited everyone to take a chance on the guessing game: “Here are three little red cups upside down, here’s me putting a little white cube under one of the cups, here’s me shifting the cups around. Take a guess, my friends! Where’s the little white cube now?”

His performance is a con, variously called three-card monte and find-the-lady and the shell game. Merlin knows how to move the cups faster than your eyes can track them, and he knows how to cheat, and he knows how to get you to part with your money, and he knows how to get you to love him although he’s ripping you off. Needless to say, the con is illegal. It's impossible for you (aka "the mark") to win the game.

“It’s free to guess, and if you guess right I’ll give you twenty bucks! No, fifty! No, a hundred bucks, a crisp C-note! Guess it right, and it’s yours!”

A fellow sitting right next to me points at one of the cups, guesses right, and wins a hundred dollars, completely risk-free, easy easy easy! Merlin hands the fellow the money, and everyone riding that L train laughs and claps and loves every second of it. Why, how, why is Merlin just giving money to a complete stranger? Anyone can guess where the little white cube is, easy easy easy! Plus, Merlin isn’t even asking you to wager anything. Guessing is free!

The fellow who won a C-note is Merlin’s confederate. There’s another fellow who plays the game, guesses right, and wins easy easy easy—and he, too, is a confederate. The trio is extremely well rehearsed, extremely efficient, and extremely fun to watch. They are life-loving, people-loving, and Chicago-loving, and Chicago loves them back unconditionally.

After everyone is hypnotized, the real game starts, because the free rounds are over and now you have to wager to play—twenty bucks, for instance. “Bet $20 and guess right, and I pay you $20. Guess it wrong, and I keep your money.” And Merlin will keep your money, because you can’t possibly win the game.

The whole thing got me thinking about performance, persuasion, and connection. It’s tempting to consider performance the domain of the stage or screen: a theater company gives a performance, or a professional pianist gives a performance, in a specialized territory like a concert hall. In truth, we’re all performers, and we perform more or less nonstop, sometimes privately, sometimes publicly, sometimes knowingly, sometimes blindly. Waiting in line at the airport security check, you perform your take on the harried traveler, or the victim, or the stoic hero, or the rebel, or the cynic, or the . . . well, you get it. To live is to perform.

Merlin and his co-conspirators are trained professionals: they make their living performing. And to perform is to persuade, which involves the suspension of disbelief. Merlin made all of us, or many of us, or some of us, forget that he was a con and a thief and a cheat and a liar. We believed he was a wonderful human being, heaven-sent to elevate our moods with his booming voice, his bright shirt, and his generosity: “Take my money!”

You watch a movie, and if the movie is any good you forget it’s a movie (pixels on a screen, “people who don’t exist doing things that never happened”) and you get carried away, identifying with the actors who play fictional characters and their struggles. Then it’s your turn: you perform for your wife, persuading her that you never, ever said that needling little remark that so irked her. She’ll believe you, or not. Good luck with the performance!

Why are we willing to be persuaded by performances, authentic or misleading? We want to believe in something, and we want to be part of something—that is, we want to connect. Merlin brought us together, gave us the feeling that we were privileged and special because he loved us and he was big and wore a bright shirt and embodied the spirit of storytelling and of play and of generosity. These are good things to believe in when they are true. But we’re willing to believe them also when they aren’t true, too, because . . . because without belief there isn’t life. The word “belief” comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to care, love, desire.”

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The L reached my destination before anyone lost money to Merlin’s big lying heart, but it was such a clever performance that I, too, would have lost twenty bucks willingly. As for losing a hundred bucks willingly, or a thousand, or five thousand . . . suspension of disbelief can be expensive. I’m glad I got off the train.

To own or not to own, that's the question

July 29, 2018

Foolishly or wisely, I often play a sort of game which consists in looking up the etymology of a word—that is, a word’s origin and the history of its meaning.

We use some ordinary word without giving it much thought, and yet that word had to be “invented,” so to speak, in order to express some aspect of reality. Who invented it, and why? When? And what is the word's deep meaning? These questions can be difficult to answer but useful to ask!

A word’s origin hints at its symbolic power, its importance, its reach. Find out what aspect of reality a word was born to express, and you’ll find out something about reality itself—and, by extension, about how you think and feel.

You own a house, perhaps. Or a car. Or a book. Or a fork. It doesn’t matter; you own something, and your relationship to the thing is partly determined by your feeling of ownership.

“To own” and “to owe” share the same root, the presumed Proto-Indo-European *aik-, meaning “be master of, possess.” If you own a house, you possess it and you’re its master. It’s an amazing thing once it enters your awareness: Ownership! Possession! Mastery! You own your identity, you own your words and ideas, you own your mistakes: you’re the master of your mistakes.

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And you own a house, perhaps. Possession plays a role in your relationship with the house. Some of your feelings, positive and negative, about “your own house” come from the responsibility of owning, as well as the pleasures of owning—the headaches and heartaches, and also the joys of it all.

Ownership is a form of power, and even a baby knows that: she must, she must own that scrap of paper she picked up at random from your wastebasket, because she feels strangely powerful in ownership, regardless of what she owns.

Possession is mastery. The “power of possession” is life-affirming and identity-determining.

The problem is that it can make you crazy. You can “become possessed,” and feel that unless you own that scrap of paper, or that car, or that handbag, you’re worthless. You measure your worth through the things that you own, and . . . you start wanting to own ever more. There’s nothing wrong with owning a house, of course; it’s only the evil twin of ownership that’s problematic, the twin that says “more, more, more, MORE!!”

Fortunately, there’s a cure for Crazy Ownership Syndrome. It’s called access.

Access also comes from a Proto-Indo-European root. (I get all these word roots from the best website ever: etymonline.)

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In our game, the Proto-Indo-European root reveals a word’s symbolic power—or, if you prefer, its reason to exist, since the word was created to express an important aspect of reality. In this case, “to go, to yield,” and further “to move, to approach, to withdraw.” As you can see, it’s very different from the idea of ownership, possession, and mastery.

You can access a database and “move through it” without having to own it. You have access to the services of a professional. You see the professional very occasionally, but your access to him or her is permanent. It only takes a phone call for you to activate your access. Come and go.

You have access to friends’ homes. They invite you to dinner and take good care of you for an hour or three. You play with their cats, and access to the cats is very dear to you. Access to a guest room in Chicago and another in Brooklyn and another in São Paulo is all you need to feel good about “having a home” without owning one.

Go to the supermarket and buy an avocado, and a little bit of Peru or Mexico or Israel enters your orbit. It’s a miracle of sorts. You don’t need to own Peru at all, because you have easy access to it! It’s right down the block and around the corner, and it only costs two dollars!

In our simplified metaphysics, ownership is a form of holding, and access is a form of letting go. They are both necessary in our lives, but it seems useful—and perhaps even urgent—to understand the distinction between the two. The sun shines above. We don't own it, but we have access to its heat and warmth during the day. Night for us is day for our neighbors a few time zones away. Let's let them have access to the sun, too!

May I . . . ?

July 5, 2018

At a street fair, you bump into an acquaintance and you say, “Hello, my dear!” Whether you do it consciously or intuitively, even before you open your mouth you’re already paying attention to what you say, how you say it, and to whom you say it.

The what, the how, and the to-whom of communication is worth studying, since it’ll help you become a better listener and speaker. Here are some tools I’ve used over the years. They’re based on two simple principles and one simple procedure. The principles are the awareness that there exist multiple modes of communication, and the awareness that there exist multiple frames of mind among your listeners. The procedure is to ask your listener permission to use one of several special communication styles.

"May I give you a compliment?"

Many people are uncomfortable receiving compliments. Some grow up with a culture of self-effacement, where sidetracking compliments is a way of life for everyone in the family or the community. Others have low self-esteem and find that a compliment, however sincere and well-meant, doesn’t match the way they feel about themselves. The compliment might strike the listener as wrong or even dirty, and you’ll be rebuked for having proffered it. Asking for permission to issue a compliment has a possibly hypnotic result: your listener probably has never, ever had the experience of being asked to give permission, much less the permission to receive a compliment.

"May I give you a compliment that risks sounding like an insult to begin with?"

Recently, an Englishwoman who took one of my workshops gave the group a short presentation on the English tradition of politeness, deference, and indirectness. She told us almost nothing about the tradition, instead deflecting attention and asking us what we thought this tradition entailed. My compliment? “You succeeded by failing, and you failed by succeeding—because you told us nothing, thereby perfectly illustrating the indirect approach.” She saw the joke and took the compliment.

"May I speak my heart?"

If you say “yes,” I might reveal some deeply held emotions, or speak harshly of someone, or pass judgment, or swear, or be politically incorrect. Anything goes, because it’s the heart talking, not the mind! And we all know that the heart beats, and blood rushes through it and makes it pump. Or something like that. After I receive the go-ahead to speak my heart, I lift my self-censure temporarily and just bleed left and right. The thing is, I’m so polite about getting permission that my bleeding is sort of organized, directed, and purposeful. Which is the point of the whole exercise.

"May I babble incoherently for a while?"

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I like asking this question with a sweet, reassuring smile, indicating that I’m in control of my lack of control. I might indeed babble incoherently, but I have things to say even if they aren’t fully articulated. The babble is a sort of performance or musical style, with the potential to caress the listener’s mind and rearrange its furniture. I exaggerate the babbling on occasion, making fun of myself and earning the goodwill of my listener, who relaxes and more or less understands what I’m trying to say.

"May I answer your question indirectly?"

Some questions are impossible to answer. They carry too much information, too many assumptions, too many needs and wants on the part of the person asking them. By requesting permission seemingly to go off subject or seemingly to avoid the question altogether, I acknowledge the question’s complexity and my inability to answer it in a concise manner. Then I can choose one or two aspects from the complex question to weave a path forward.

"May I tell you a joke?"

Someone talks to you with deep feelings about an important subject. If you happen to know of an anecdote that addresses the talker’s needs, or takes his or her mind off the urgent feelings for a little while, or gives the listener a chance to breathe and relax, telling a joke is can be very helpful. Ask for permission with a friendly tone of voice, indicating that you heard the other person’s feelings and you aren’t planning to trample on him or her with your joke.

Walk the Paradox

June 3, 2018

I turned 60 the other day. My younger brother, sending me his wishes, pointed out that 60 divides by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60, making it a very useful number. Back in the 3rd millennium BC, the Sumerians created a base-60 numeral system, called of course Sexagesimal (of course! you knew that already!) (enough with the you-knew-that-already!). Today we still employ it, in modified form, to count seconds and minutes and months and years, and to calculate angles and geographical coordinates.

In other words, space and time.

To celebrate my birthday, I spent a day and a night in Chartres with my wife Alexis. We did the same thing four years ago: Walk here and there, watch the magnificent illuminations projected upon the Cathedral and many other buildings, eat and drink, sleep and dream, space and time. Yes, space and time are verbs, actions, processes with hearts and minds of their own.

Every place in the world is a good place for you to space and time. Chartres, however, is extra-good, in particular because of its Cathedral and what it represents, which we could call Eternity.

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Eternity—I mean, the Cathedral in Chartres—occupies a privileged position in space: high and visible from afar. Its location and height multiply its importance, its power to impress and elevate. Today, you can see its spires from the train station. Eight hundred years ago, when people had the habit of looking into the distance, you could see the spires from the “outer space in your brain,” to coin an expression. Looking into the distance and looking at your smartphone are both manifestations of the space-and-time continuum, but, man, looking into the distance is kinda awesome.

Plato, Socrates, and Onassis met in a taverna and said, “Hey, let’s confuse people for the next two thousand years. One of us will say, ‘All I know is that I don’t know,’ another will pretend to have heard it, and the third will spread the rumor.” Ever since, Wikipedia has been trying to sort out the so-called “Socratic Paradox,” with limited success since NO ONE CAN SORT OUT A PARADOX.

But you can live it. Or, at least, you can walk it.

Visiting Chartres, you'll embody the I-don't-know principle. You won’t be able to understand how people built it without computers or power tools. You’ll look at the iconography, the stained-glass windows and the statuary, and you won’t know what each face and each beard and each fold of each garment is trying to tell you.

You’ll see hundreds of people from dozens of countries, walking here and there, taking photos, and—and singing, for Pete’s sake. And you won’t know if they’re “tourists” or “pilgrims.” Best of all, you won’t know if you yourself, in your flesh-and-bones here-and-nowness, are a tourist or a pilgrim.

High school kids in high mode.

The Cathedral has a labyrinth of stone and love, right in the middle of the nave. No one knows exactly when it was built, or by whom, or what for. For our purposes, we'll say it was built in 1200, a nice Sexagesimal number. A walk from the entry point to the center, and back out again, lasts anywhere from seven minutes to seven centuries, depending on your speed and state of mind. What will you find at the center of the labyrinth? This, too, depends on your state of mind. And it’s possible that the very walk might change what you're feeling, thinking, and doing. You won't know what you'll find until you find it.

Do you need the labyrinth to Walk the Paradox? No. You can walk anywhere, within and without the Cathedral.

You might not have to walk at all. You can simply watch a video clip that a guy made, very indirectly inspired by Chartres and its labyrinthine paradoxes.

Inspired by the Labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral.

And for those of you who aren't cathedralicals, to coin a word, here's the profane version of the space-and-time walk. It's the ABSOLUTE SAME THING! Thus shouted Zarathustra from his mountain top!

It's good to walk, alone or together. Dancing and skipping are good too.

In praise of not understanding

April 24, 2018

I recently attended a conference in Malta, a marvelous island country smack in the middle of the Mediterranean, not far from Sicily and not far from the coast of North Africa. Because of its strategic importance, over the millennia Malta has known war, strife, occupation, depredations and glories galore.

Malta is very beautiful, thought-provoking and sensation-inducing.

Heading out one night to a concert by one of the conference’s participants, I had a little spare time and decided to enter the Church of St. Publius, the patron saint of Floriana, a town adjacent to the capital Valletta. Publius is a big deal; according to tradition, he received Paul (the apostle) when the latter survived a shipwreck in Malta roughly two thousand years ago.

The Church of St. Publius was built in stages over several centuries. What, exactly, is its style? I think that’s the wrong question. A better one is, “How do you feel when you enter the church? Where are you? What’s going on? What are they saying? What’s it all about?”

The church was nearly full, most people in the congregation dressed for a sober occasion. A priest said Mass. Maltese is a strange and fascinating language. Derived from Siculo-Arabic, a now-dead form of Arabic spoken in Sicily a thousand years ago, Maltese is unique among languages; simplifying it, we'll call it a Latinized Semitic language. If you speak Italian, you’ll recognize words in Maltese; if you speak Arabic, you’ll also recognize words in Maltese; if you speak English, you’ll have a head trip and enjoy the swing of an incomprehensible language. Listening to Maltese is like having a dream where someone is telling you something important concerning your future. You’re desperately trying to understand it all, and at the same time you feel as if you’re unworthy of being told the secret of life.

I recorded a little snippet from the Mass. I added a few photos from the church interiors. For good measure, I added background bells that I recorded at a different church (there are many churches in Malta!).

Listening to Mass in Maltese, in a church built over several centuries and bedecked in extravagant finery, I was transported to the “Land of Non-understanding,” or as we say in Maltese, “Art ta ‘nuqqas ta’ fehim.” I mean, I didn’t have any idea what the priest was talking about; and I also didn’t have a good idea as to what all the art works and decorations in the church represented; and I also didn’t know what was happening, socially and culturally and historically, within the congregation.

I grew up with Catholicism in Brazil, though it didn’t really “take.” My catechism teacher once told my mother, with a heavy heart, “Pedro could become a Protestant pastor one day.” (I was ten years old.) But that’s a whole other story; this one is about understanding and not understanding, and let’s say that my background in Brazil half a century ago may have helped or hindered my understanding of what was happening at the Church of St. Publius in Floriana, Malta, in April, 2018.

My theory is that most of the time and in most places, most of us don’t truly understand what’s going on. Or, rather, we have our own subjective understanding of what we see, read, and hear; and by “subjective” I mean “filtered, biased, wobbly, unreliable, incoherent, potentially destructive, potentially constructive.” And I think this is inevitable, for the simple reason that we’re human. My suggestion is that we accept and embrace the reality of not understanding reality.

This is as true of a Brazilian attending Mass in Maltese as it is of the same Brazilian listening to his wife, whom he’s known for more than twenty years and whom he loves dearly. Yes, my wife speaks Maltese to me! And I to her, though we speak mutually incomprehensible versions of Maltese, and both versions are called “English.” How confusing is that?

Thinking processes, deeply infused with sensations and emotions, are authentically subjective. Understanding is necessarily subjective, emotive, and “sensational,” to mis-employ a word. How much of Malta did I really understand? Its streets are crowded with icons, statues big and small, banners, and all sorts of religiabilia. (Made-up vocabulary enhances mis-understandability, although common words are just as easy to mis-use and mis-understand.) Do I really understand how the Maltese celebrate the Divine? Are they even celebrating the Divine? What, exactly, is the Divine?

It’s foolish to make assumptions about anything, and it’s very foolish to make assumptions about how much you understand the Other, and how much the Other understands you. Understanding is a dog with three heads and five tails. Don't let it bite you!

I had a wonderful time in Malta, a wonderful time interacting with my colleagues at the conference, and a wonderful time expressing myself verbally and otherwise in front of a hundred puzzled listeners. We mis-understood one another perfectly.

What suits you better?

April 2, 2018

To simplify is to lie. And yet, understanding a lie is better than misunderstanding the truth. Simplifying it, we’ll say that several thousand years ago, a people living in what we now call Ukraine spoke a beautiful and complex language. The people domesticated horses, rode wheel wagons, traveled and migrated, thereby spreading its culture and language. But in the spreading, the language became transformed into a hundred other languages, as varied as Sanskrit and Greek, Latin and Russian, Portuguese and German. The original language itself disappeared, and all we have left are the transformations.

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We can’t prove this, but we can argue for it using indirect evidence, mostly by comparing different languages, and also by using some genetics and some archaeology.

For instance, the words for numbers one to ten are very similar in disparate languages. Is this a crazy, crazy coincidence, or do the disparate languages come from a shared root?

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This hypothetical language for which we don’t have hard evidence is called Proto-Indo-European—that is, a language that was the “prototype” for many languages spoken in Europe and in India. Some of these languages are now dead, and others are alive and well, thank you very much . . . like, you know, English, for chrissakes.

Misleading as it may seem, this post isn’t about the Proto-Indo-European hypothesis. It’s about the things we believe in, and the reasons why we believe them.

“Do you believe in a Supreme Being?” It’s perhaps more constructive to ask the question like this: “What suits you better, to believe in a Supreme Being or not to believe in a Supreme Being?” What suits you better, to believe in a hopeful future or to believe in doom? What suits you better, to believe that animals have self-awareness or that they're a bundle of reflexes? What suits you better, to believe that mathematics is exciting or boring? If you adamantly affirm that mathematics is boring, you’re saying that at least for now it suits you better to believe that mathematics is boring. You're making a statement about yourself, not the thing or person or idea in question. And this is inevitable: any one thing is what you make of it, and the "you" in it is primary, the "thing" is secondary.

It suits me to believe in the Proto-Indo-European hypothesis. It stimulates my imagination, it leads me to seek connections among words and among languages, it invites me to study history and geography and linguistics. In my head trip (my subjective response, informed by my subjective filters), this ancestral language was deeply rooted in nature and full of symbolic dimensions born of the mysteries of existence. No, I can’t prove any of it; no, I don’t know what I'm talking about; yes, I like believing in it because it gives me—here, now!—a feeling of rootedness and integration.

Suppose the Proto-Indo-European hypothesis will be debunked one of these days: a geologist or a psychiatrist or an albino raccoon from outer space will demonstrate that the hypothesis is a fabrication, a delusion, a HOAX! It’s not going to change anything for me. I’ll carry on believing in it, because I like it; it’s meaningful to me, it’s beautiful, just beautiful.

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As you can see, the speculative and hypothetical Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root for the word "beauty" is related to the idea of reverence. It proves!—beyond a shade of doubt!—how poetic and integrative our ancestral language was! (It proves no such thing, of course; I'm having a head trip and enjoying myself, and teasing myself about how silly I am at the same time that I state an actual belief of mine. Exclamation marks are obligatory when you're incoherent and drunk-happy.)

Your beliefs may be completely different from mine, but you and I are alike in that we believe what suits us, temperamentally and culturally. From hard facts, from soft facts, from un-facts and anti-facts we build our personal narratives through filters of which we aren't always aware. Let's respect the facts, acknowledge the filters, and assume full ownership of our beliefs.

Separation anxiety

February 28, 2018

Some years ago, I attended a big conference in Lugano, a beautiful lakeside town in Switzerland. Summer, breeze, pleasure, heaven. Waiting for a cable car to go up a hill, I watched my fellow human beings loitering in the plaza next to the cable-car stop. A boy, aged five or six, played a game on a smartphone. He looked up from his game, and to his horror his mother wasn’t in his line of sight. He let out a terrified and terrifying sound, animal, bestial, feral; an amazing sound for a child to make, not pretty at all but amazing all the same.

His mother quickly re-entered his line of sight, and the boy went back to playing his game as if nothing had happened.

I’ve witnessed other episodes of this sort, all terrifying, all amazing: a child’s fear of finding himself or herself alone in the world, separated from parents, and at imminent risk of death. This is separation anxiety in its most primeval form.

For a few months before our births, we’re completely amalgamated with the mother; we’re one with her, and symbolically one with the Universe. We’re cocooned, protected, loved, housed, fed, clothed though naked, our every need taken care of even before the need expresses itself to us; we're in heaven, like Lugano in summer.

Then we’re born, and things aren’t the same anymore: Separation starts, and with it its primeval anxieties. It’s a long process, unfolding itself over years and decades, over a lifetime—I mean, not a lifetime dealing with our separation from our mothers, but a lifetime dealing with separation itself, or the disruption of one-ness and the start of two-ness, duality, and conflict.

The word “doubt” is rooted in “two,” or more specifically “to have to choose between two things.” One: no conflict; two: conflict.

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Separation anxiety manifests itself in a thousand ways. You can feel anxious about separating from an old, frayed, stained shirt; separating from a friend at the end of a shared meal, even though you’ll see the friend again two days later; separating from an environment, as when you move house or as when you don’t want to leave the beach at sunset. You can feel anxious about separating from daytime and entering the night.

You can feel anxious about separating from your words and sounds; hence your hesitation to speak in public. You can feel anxious about separating from a habit, a thought, an idea, a feeling. Indeed, you can feel anxious—very anxious!—about separating from anything you identify with; that is, anxious about separating from your identity.

And yet, separate you must. The friend will go home, the moment will dissipate, the sun will go down; the sun will leave you; you won’t be one with the sun, but two: you here, the sun there, gone.

Paradoxically, the way forward is to embrace separation rather than trying to eliminate it. And, paradoxically, once you really embrace separation you’ll find yourself in heaven again, united with the Universe. You’ll separate from your ego and rejoin the self (also known as the Self). It’s simple, really: you’ll “separate from the separation.”

Simple, but not easy; it takes a tremendous amount of work, a whole lifetime; according to some authorities, several lifetimes; you’ll be reborn again and again until you succeed in separating yourself from the anxiety and ascending, as it were, to a higher sphere. But you don’t have to enter into metaphysical speculations to appreciate the importance of separation anxiety and the urgency of dealing with it.

And . . . how? Over the thousand years, a thousand schools have arisen, proposing meditations, prayers, methods, postures, sayings, disciplines; breathing exercises; psychotropic drugs. Despite the variety of methods, the message is always the same: Let go. Let go of the monkey mind, of the suppositions, of the judgments; let go of the resentments and worries, let go of fixed ideas and prejudices; let go, let go, let go. The letting go has been called Zen and it’s been called Tao; it’s been called distance, restraint, devotion, submission, non-doing, the Void, think before you act, don’t think so much, listen more and talk less, God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason. But it all goes back to this one principle: Let go. Let go of the thing, the idea, the place, the person, the emotion.

Here’s what I propose: a little drawing, a scheme, a formula! Yay, finally a formula for letting go! (It’s a joke, of course; the formula is secret, and I’m not allowed to divulge it.) (Meta-joke.)

You know how complicated those metaphysical speculations can become. I’m going to bypass the complication and embrace the simplification. I’m just going to show you the little drawing, okay? I’m not going to explain it, okay? I’m having separation anxiety, okay? This little drawing means a lot to me, okay? Bye bye, little drawing! Come back soon, little drawing!

To know, or not to know? That's the question.

January 28, 2018

Recently I gave a workshop in Paris on the theme of creativity. Ten people working together, eight nationalities, thirteen languages, quite a festival. (The photos above are from similar workshops in Glasgow, Paris, Porto, and Montevideo.)

Partly because of the subject matter itself, and partly because of my temperament and my pedagogical convictions, most of the workshop consisted in our playing all sorts of games: word games, grid games, singing, dancing, talking, joking, laughing, willingly making fools of ourselves, and generally having a good time.

Behind all the fun, however, there were important principles, existential questions, “meaning-of-life” situations, “who-am-I” and “where-am-I-going” episodes.

The better to integrate the existential questions, the creativity, and the good times, I had structured the workshop along four segments, each with its own exercises. One of the segments was called “Hyperlinking,” another “Theme & Variations.”

I had taught these segments in the past, and I had prepared the workshop’s materials ahead of time. But here’s the rub. Late in the workshop, someone asked me an eager and urgent question: “What are these exercises about? What are you trying to tell us with Hyperlinking and Theme & Variations?”

I was stumped. Suddenly I was like Wile E. Coyote when he realizes the ground under his feet isn’t there anymore, and he’s doomed to fall to his death.

My ideas, exercises, and games all start from an intuitive source, the workings of which are difficult to explain intellectually. An inkling, sometimes vague and sometimes delineated, enters my awareness . . . sometimes uninvited, sometimes beckoned by my needs or those of a student I’m working with. The inkling might include words, or might be a shape or form; the inkling might be a punchy little phrase that encapsulates a problem and proposes a solution; the inkling might be a fully structured original exercise, or a starting point for something that will unfold over days, weeks, months, or years. Often, the inkling triggers a “ha-ha!” in me, a pleasure tinged with gratitude as if I’ve just received a gift from heaven.

Yay! . . . except that the task remains of “embodying” the inkling, transforming it into a practical and useful tool that other people can employ to make a change, overcome an obstacle, or heal a pain. It isn’t enough to create the tool; people with whom you're sharing your tool need a sort of instruction manual so that they understand it all—the problem and the solution, the tool and the technique, the meaning and the importance of what they’re undertaking.

have an insight >> create a tool >> communicate clearly

When the workshop participant asked me her pointed question, I didn’t know what to say, as my inkling hadn't finished coalescing into an unequivocal form. Falling to the ground in front of ten students, ten paying customers with needs, wants, and expectations, I underwent multiple emotions in a matter of seconds. “But I thought it was all perfectly clear!” “But I thought we were having a good time!” “Don’t you love me anymore?” “Wait, you’re right—good question!” “I don’t know the answer!” “Someone, help me!”

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And, seconds into my descent, I received help, and I started talking, or someone in the inner stratosphere started talking through me. There was some babbling to begin with, then I—-he, she, ze, Zeus!—spoke. “Theme & Variations symbolically means to get your mind to stay where it is. Hyperlinking symbolically means to let your mind go somewhere.”

I hadn’t thought of this formulation before. All of a sudden I crystallized information that I knew and didn’t know, that I understood and didn’t understand, that I embodied and didn’t embody. Thanks to the whole situation, thanks to the question and the tone of voice in which it was asked, thanks to timing and circumstance I arrived at a moment of clarity. And my student “got it” in a flash.

You can only do so much preparation; you can only control your life so much; you can only think so much before something other than thinking clicks in. Yes, it can be very uncomfortable to not know, and to not control a process or its outcome! . . . particularly in a public and professional setting. But, ultimately, what would you prefer: barren certainty or fertile uncertainty? It's worth falling (or, better still, jumping!) to the bottom of Monument Valley to find out.

Watch Wile E. Coyote flying suit GIF by sickbrain on Gfycat. Discover more elderscrollsonline GIFs on Gfycat.

Nostrils, Sacred & Profane

January 1, 2018

A few years ago, my wife Alexis and I attended a performance of a troupe called The New Vietnam Circus. Trapeze artists, dancers, and musicians from Vietnam wove a tapestry of sight and sound, inspired by the mythical power of the bamboo. It was unforgettable and beautiful and strange and perfect.

After the performance, I bought a couple of . . . of what I thought were knick-knacks at the theater store: a ten-euro bamboo flute, and a five-euro nose flute. Toys; cute objects; mementos from the evening. “Nothings.” But I was wrong in my assessment of their worth.

This is my nose flute. The Obama bobblehead is there only because I really, really miss Obama.

I put the nose flute aside and didn’t think much about it. Then, roaming YouTube the other day, I came across a clip of a jokey but affecting performance of the song “Africa” by two people playing ukuleles and blowing on plastic nose flutes, which they attached to their faces with rubber bands.

I felt I needed to educate myself a bit on the nose flute. I discovered that there exist many types and models, and many aesthetics. The ukulele-playing girl has developed an impressive set of nose-flute skills, and she has a devoted following on YouTube. She calls herself the NoseFluter. Her partner on the “Africa” clip does his own thing, too, clever and touching.

But here’s the thing. Watching these skillful silly skits employing the nose flute, I surmised that there must a different dimension, a secret and deeper reason for the nose flute to exist and for people to become involved with it. And I found it, deeply embodied in this Vietnamese woman.

Played in this manner, the nose flute requires poise, breath control, a connection with the Creative Source, an inner discipline. Through the nose flute, the ego might possibly disappear, allowing the Self to emerge. Silly skits are the profane manifestation of something that exists in the divine realm, connected with Nature, timeless and eternal.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m in favor of the profane, which is a necessary counterpart to the sacred. Plus, I’m not saying that something is either sacred or profane. The yes/no switch doesn’t apply to metaphysical matters! Plus plus, I’m not saying I even know what those big words mean: sacred, profane, the ego, the Self, the Creative Source . . . no. I can’t begin to define them. Instead, here I’m simply posting my own modest contribution to the Nose Flute canon, and I offer my clip as my “Happy 2018” to one and all. Let the New Year bring you Two Nostrils, one sacred and one profane!