Let the Play Begin!

The spirit of play pervades human actions and interactions. Little kids play-act to figure things out, to express their thoughts and emotions, to understand the world and their place in it. And also to have a tremendous amount of fun. Here’s a little boy play-acting breastfeeding with a doll. From a single image we can’t really know how the boy is thinking and feeling, but we’ll hypothesize that he’s dealing with something deep inside himself, perhaps something having to do with love and nourishment, perhaps having to do with loneliness and neglect.

Play-acting is central to learning, and learning is central to survival. Gotcha, ergo, voilà: playing is vital, and the absence of playing is fatal.

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances . . .

A little effort of the imagination lets you see every human interaction as a dramatic event in an infinite play. We are players, as Shakespeare said, but we are also the characters that our players perform. The character of Father Berating the Son; the character of Fool Begging for Attention; the character of Dutiful Wife with a Dark Secret . . . all of us, at all times, are characters with many dimensions, playing, playing, and playing every day, all day long. All is play.

The radio is playing, the TV is playing. If you hear any one snippet of music, someone is playing it. A fellow like me starts playing music at age eight. Fifty-four years later he’ll have played for thousands and thousands of hours. “It’s normal to play.”

You play soccer or volleyball, and you watch other people play their sports; you’re a fan (short for fanatic). You “play the market,” and so do the brilliant financial brains taking care of your pension fund. The Army and Navy play “war games” to figure out strategy and tactics. Probability theory, central to mathematics and also to our daily lives, came into existence because of gambling. Simplifying it, the guys wanted to know their odds. Game theory, another vital dimension of mathematics, takes insights from certain types of play and applies them to the social sciences, economics, and much else besides. 

You play with an idea, trying to see what you can do with it. You “play it up” or “play it down,” depending on the setting. Right now I’m playing up the idea of play.

Ritual is play, and ritual is behind many if not most interactions between people. Hand shakes: play. Air kisses: play. The Mass: extremely elaborate play. Baptism: play. Wedding: play. Yes, we play at funerals too.

This Christmas, I traveled to Nigeria, West Africa in order to attend my Grandma Monica Ogbonnaya Orie's funeral. Last year I attended my Great Aunt Alaezi A...

Mourning, however, isn’t play. It’s a very serious business.

This is from the show "best funeral ever".Clean it up! For real!

Broadly defined, play is at the core of existence. Play is love, direction, meaning. Play is human connection, give-and-take, learn-and-grow. Play is the why and the how.

Eve-ry-thing is play. P-L-A-Y.

From my favorite website, etymonline.

As a player, you can be willing, astute, agile, and engaged. Then you’re “alive.” Or you can sit in the corner and “play dead.”

©2021 Pedro de Alcantara

I Am the Banana

People come in many types and shapes. Flavors, also. There’s a big difference between salami and strawberry.

But I diverge. I was trying to say that people really are different one from the other. Different beliefs, preferences, behaviors, talents, and habits.

There are many ways of developing a skill such as cooking, playing a musical instrument, driving, speaking a foreign language, and so on. In general, the acquisition goes through phases: beginner, intermediate, advanced, expert. Or: I’m afraid of doing this, I’ll never be any good, hey it’s not so difficult, hey it’s kinda fun, hey I’m good at it. Or: I have a goal in mind, and I’ll develop a strategy to move toward the goal.

I’m proposing a strategy that applies to many skills. To illustrate it, I’ll use the skill of drawing. But! . . . be warned: it only works for a certain type of person.

A specific goal can magnetize your intentionality and give you direction and discipline: I’m going to learn Spanish in three years or less. I’m going to get a black belt in aikido. I’m going to clear all my debts and accumulate some savings. The problem is that a specific goal can also make you narrow-minded, neurotic, nervous, nincompoopy, nihilistic, and salami. You really want to reach the goal, and soon; and you want to be perfect; and you become judgmental and harsh toward yourself because you ain’t learning or saving fast enough, or trying hard enough; harder, harder, harder, Pedro!; and the goal recedes away from you. Madre de Dios, ¡Spanish is un lenguaje diabólico, I’ll never learn it!

Goals have feelings. Don’t talk harshly to your goals, or they’ll recede away from you.

Here’s the strategy. (1) Relax. (2) Relax, and lower your standards, temporarily at least. (3) Relax, and get into the playful swing of the multidimensional learning experience. (4) Relax, and let the goal come toward you.

You want to draw, and to draw beautifully, and to draw well, and above all to draw well; yes, you want to draw about as well as Dürer, Picasso, and Hockney rolled into one. Me too, I wanna draw like that. Relax, and lower your standards. Picasso is always photographed half-naked and smiling, smoking cigarettes, dancing, telling jokes, drinking wine, and playacting. David Hockney is always photographed smiling, smoking cigarettes, and we don’t know that much about his daily habits. But, man, he seems to have so much fun with his art!

Relax, take a pencil and a sheet of paper, and start moving your arm back and forth in space with the tip of the pencil touching the paper. You’re not “drawing,” you’re relaxing and moving, your arm is dancing and your hand is prancing, and your mind is on vacation in Antibes or Saint Jean-du-Pin. It doesn’t matter what result the prancing pencil produces, because you’re not “drawing.”

Look at some object, let’s say a banana. Relax, let your hand and your pencil prance, and let your relaxed eyes visually caress that banana and let your hand follow the visual caress. You’re not “drawing,” you’re “acariciando el hermoso plátano mientras está de vacaciones mentales,” as Pablo would say. Pablo, you know—Picasso. The genius who, among other things, invented Google Translate.

Look at the banana again. A few lines, or curves; its lines are unlike those of an apple. Draw some banana-like lines, an approximation of its geometry, its imagined skeleton. You’re not “drawing,” you’re having a head trip partly inspired by the banana in your line of sight. You’re hallucinating a banana exo-skeleton, and oh this is so much better than ¡try harder harder harder, Pedrito por amor a Dios!

Look at the banana yet again. Let your wrist and pencil prance, and let the prance capture the essence of banana-ness. Then juxtapose an exo-skeleton of a few curves right atop the essence of banana-ness. And, holy moly Santa Moly, “a banana has drawn itself through you,” “while you were on vacation,” “and Albrecht Dürer has never, ever drawn a banana like your banana, Pedro.” The last statement is technically true.

And that’s how you begin to acquire skills: by relaxing your judgments and overly narrow goals, and by engaging in a fluid process of observation, creativity, risk-taking, and pleasure. Then it’s a matter of practice and time. This applies to drawing, learning a foreign language, preparing a presentation, anything, everything. But not everybody; the procedure suits only those types of people who are willing to having fun while perfecting their skills. Are you a strawberry? Welcome to the club. Are you a salami?

Un salami y una mortadela entran en un bar. El barman dice: ¡Ve a darte una ducha, hombre! ¡Los dos, por amor a la patria!*

*Translation: “Relax, and lower your standards.”

©2020, Pedro de Alcantara 

Of Journeys and Decisions

Lao Tzu was sitting on the trusty squeaky rocker in his porch when Confucius happened to come by. “Thou frowneth,” Confucius said. “What ails thee, dear Shih Tzu?”

Lao had heard the joke before, but he had Tao-ed himself into not minding it too much. “I’m going on a thousand-mile journey, Confusion.”

Confucius had heard the joke before, and he really hated it. But he kept it all bottled up. “A thousand-mile journey,” he chuckled. “And this concerns me how, Shih Shih?”

Tzu didn’t mind one Shih, but two? He kept it all bottled up. “I don’t know how to start.”

Confucius took a breath in through his left nostril, and let it out through the right. It was a cold day, and you could see the puffy puffs from his breathing. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” he said with a slight bow and two puffy puffs.

Hearing this bit of commonplace so-called wisdom, Shih Shih—I mean, Lao—couldn’t take it any longer. He sprang into action, unsheathed his invisible sword, and cut Confusion—sorry, I mean Kung Fucious—into 7456 paper butterflies. Confucius vanished, just like in a movie directed by Ang Lee. And Lao Tzu took the first, single step on his thousand-mile journey. Truth be told, he was happy that his old, old, old friend had helped him get off his rocker.

In 1969 I was eleven years old, and I attended middle school in São Paulo, Brazil. The building still stands, although the actual school is no more.

One day I’ll tell you about the joys and horrors of middle school—no, never! I’ll never go back to middle school, never, ever, forever and whatever! But the thing is, we had English class twice a week (with a teacher who may or may not have been named Mildred or Meredith). And our textbook was titled First Things First. It was a beautiful little object, nicely designed with not too much text and some groovy drawings. It made us feel super-sophisticated: learning a foreign language, learning to speak differently, learning to think differently, learning to be someone else. Yay! In only eight years I’d leave Brazil for good and start roaming the world, but I didn’t know that yet.

First Things First, the book and its title, the thoughts and emotions that the book triggered, the dreams and aspirations of the eleven-year-old, they have all stayed with me. If Marcel Proust had Internet, I bet he too would Google a ton of stuff from his childhood. This is a very “English” English textbook: the first page of the first lesson is all about manners, excuse me, pardon, thank you.

There’s a famous apocryphal saying variously attributed to Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or Genghis Khan: “If I have six hours to chop down a tree, I’ll spend the first four hours sharpening my ax.” Actually, Genghis is suspected of having stolen George’s ax, but it doesn’t change the gist of it: sharpen first, chop down second. First things first!

When you have a big mess somewhere—the dining room after a party, for instance—you’ll make a first decision: to open the windows and air the room; to collect all the glasses before collecting any plates; or to throw away that chunk of stinky cheese before doing anything else, by Jove! A smart first decision improves working conditions, saves time and effort, and produces much better results.

Your “first reaction” to any one stimulus is supremely important: love or fear, relaxation or contraction, feel good or feel bad. The reaction is embodied. Head, neck, and back; jaw, tongue, and throat; shoulders and arms, pelvis and legs. Toes. And every vein and cartilage, also the hairs on the back of your neck and the goose pimples (which we Brazilians call the goose pimps). The embodiment happens in two ways: gradually and suddenly, both at the same time. Warning: on this paragraph, one or more statements may be jokes. Re-read, please.

Despite being as opposite as Heaven and Earth, Lao Tzu and Confucius do agree on the most important of principles:

Feeling good feels good, and feeling bad feels bad.

Feeling bad scrunches your neck and thickens your blood and lowers your intelligence. Feeling good elevates your soul and warms your heart and zips up your pants. The “zero decision,” before the first decision, is to feel good. Because you really don’t want to sharpen that ax or to chop down that tree when your intelligence is low and your fly is undone.

Feel good first, then sharpen the ax and chop the tree. Feel good first, then throw away the stinky cheese and move house. Feel good first, then take the first step on the thousand-mile journey.

©2020, Pedro de Alcantara

Hydrology of Self

Be warned: this post isn’t really about river systems, hydrology, the Mississippi, the Amazon, or the Seine. Or the Thames or the Danube or the Styx. It’s not even about water. It’s about you, oh you reader you!

When you’re sitting at a riverside café in Paris, you might forget or neglect to think that the Seine is connected to an entire ecosystem of rivers, brooks, sources, canals, and multiple other intertwined geographical features.

Look at this intriguing map showing the Seine basin, spreading over a good chunk of France.

Its source is in a tiny little town conveniently called Source-Seine. Long ago the city of Paris actually bought the land right around the source . . . “Paris owns the source.” There’s a sort of grotto marking it, with the statue of a nymph. Did you know that the goddess of the Seine is called Sequana? The source was considered sacred by the Gauls and then by the Romans. Strictly speaking, water is indeed sacred, because without water we perish!

The image below is from the vicinity of the source. The Seine, the storied and beloved river, is but a puddle. (We Brazilians pronounce it “poodle.”)

The river grows and grows, until it discharges into the Atlantic Ocean near the city of Le Havre. Before it gets there, it receives the waters and the sediments from many other rivers. And each tributary to the Seine has its own trajectory, its own sacred healing source, its own magic and mystery.

Thinking all of this might enhance your enjoyment of those riverside moments, when you’re walking alone or with your wife or with visiting friends. And it doesn’t have to be the Seine or Paris. Any river, every river, all rivers.

Look at this wonderful map of the Mississippi. The name of the river is a French transformation of an Algonquin term which can be traced to the Ojibwa mshi- "big," and ziibi "river."

The thing is gigantic. It’s, like, really huge. It’s, like, continental. How many tributaries? How many towns and cities along it? How many people affected by its course? How many stories told about it? The true size and impact of the river system is incalculable.

Without meaning to insult my American friends who are rightly awed by their river and proud of it, the Amazon is much bigger than the Mississippi. The Amazon has more than 1,100 tributaries, twelve of which are longer than 1,500 kilometers. The Amazon basin cover 2.7 million square miles. Well, never mind about the numbers. The thing is “incalculable and unfathomable,” or as we say in Icelandic, “óútreiknanlegur og órannsakanlegur.”

I warned you, and now I remind you: this blog post isn’t about rivers or about water. I’m laying out a metaphor, an analogy. A human being is like a river system with interconnected sources, brooks, and canals, and with numerous tributaries. Every time you meet someone; every time you think you know someone; every time you want to categorize someone or perhaps judge someone, you might want to remember that the unique person in front of you is an unfathomable combination of more factors than anybody can list or comprehend or control.

The Marmoré, a winding river in the Amazon basin. Satellite image from NASA.

Biology and family dynamics are tributaries of the river-that-is-you. Much like the Seine, you’re born from a source, and to begin with you’re but a poodle. I mean, puddle. Parents, grandparents, great-grandparents are all tributaries—including people you’ve never met face-to-face, but who somehow “discharge into you” through indirect means. My father’s father’s father’s father is in me. I’ll say that “he is I, and I am he.”

From Useful Charts.

Schooling is a major tributary. The teachers, the physical setting, the bus you take to get there, the classmates. The desks! All those things are feeding the river-that-is-you, and they’ve continued to feed you decades after you finished your schooling.

My late mother was a fine amateur pianist. My first memory of music is of her playing a sonata by Domenico Scarlatti, and me running around the room in excitement. I think I was five, maybe six years old. Here’s my favorite pianist, Arturo Benedetti Michelangelo, playing Scarlatti. I still want to run around the room in excitement.

The great pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (1920-1995) plays Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), Sonata in B minor. This is a September 1962 concert. The in...

Decades of music, of listening, of playing, of studying, of bathing in the immense river of music . . . it’s a major tributary in my life, incalculable and unfathomable.

Languages; mathematics; metaphysics; travels; books, the ones I’ve read and the ones I’ve written; the visual arts; Zen and aikido, both of which I approached superficially but unforgettably; the Alexander Technique; Carl Jung and his insights, also Marie-Louise von Franz and her insights following Jung; improvisatory comedy; the worlds of creativity, intuition, and mystery . . . these are some of my tributaries. You, oh dear reader you reader, you necessarily have your own multiple tributaries, which interact in you and through you incalculably—or, as we say in Esperanto, “nekalkuleble.” (Believe it or not, I learned Esperanto when I was 14 years old. It’s one of my tributaries, now almost completely dry but still contributing something to the basin.)

Here's the main idea. The Amazon is each of its 1,100 tributaries—together and inseparably. Therein we swim. When you meet a person, you don’t meet her source or her tributaries or her canal locks. You meet the whole system, the whole landscape. And you meet her at her delta or her estuary—at the place where her totality is emptying into the infinite ocean of the here-now. The whole-person-that-is-you meets the whole-person-that-is-the-other.

This is the schematized river hydrology of Germany.

From Grasshopper Geography.

And this is an x-ray of a person’s incalculable tributaries.

©2020, Pedro de Alcantara

Envy Yourself! (to the extent that you can)

Although envy is incurable, today I’m proposing a cure for it.

Envy is one of the seven capital sins, together with Sneezy, Happy, Grumpy—wait, let’s start again. Envy is one of the seven capital sins, together with Washington, Moscow, Berlin—well, never mind.

Envy is a nasty little psychological habit that has the power to ruin your life. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of envy, then I envy you. So, let me explain: envy is a misdirection of wanting. Envy is “wanting gone bad.” Envy is resenting someone for having something that you don’t have. The something can be an object, a quality, a characteristic, a talent, an achievement. Or good looks, or lots of friends, or sweet-smelling armpits, for instance in babies after their bath.

From etymonline.com

Minestrone ingredients (as per Jamie Oliver): 1 clove of garlic, 1 red onion, 2 carrots, 2 sticks of celery, 1 courgette, 1 small leek, 1 large potato, 1 x 400 g tin of cannellini beans, 2 rashers of higher-welfare smoked streaky bacon, olive oil, ½ teaspoon dried oregano, 1 fresh bay leaf, 2 x 400 g tins of plum tomatoes, 1 liter organic vegetable stock, 1 large handful of seasonal greens, such as savoy cabbage, curly kale, or chard, 100 g whole-wheat pasta, ½ a bunch of fresh basil (optional), Parmesan cheese.  

Envy ingredients (as per The Envy Recipe Book): resentment, ill will, malice, yellow bile, black bile, bitterness, frustration, obsession, daggers, rat poison, anonymous letters using cut-up headlines from a crumpled newspaper, rotten moldy Parmesan cheese years—years!—beyond the sell-by date.

From Catherine Willis’s prodigious creativity.

To explain the cure, I’ll describe a clinical case using myself as a hypothetical infected patient. I’m a devoted art lover, and have been for decades. Museums and galleries, visits to artists’ studios, pilgrimages to the birth places of great artists, books about the creative processes of painters and sculptors, I live for it all. I’m a fan of Klee, Mondrian, Cézanne, Albers; also of Fra Angelico and Caravaggio; also of Morandi, Brancusi, David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Mary Frances Judge, Catherine Willis, and a hundred other marvelous inspired and inspiring human beings.

But let’s focus on Sean Scully for a moment. Let’s let Wikipedia introduce him (abridged):

Sean Scully (born 30 June 1945) is an Irish-born American-based artist working as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and photographer. His work is held in museum collections worldwide and he has twice been named a Turner Prize nominee. Scully has also been a lecturer and professor at a number of universities and is highly regarded for his writing and teachings.

Among many other beautiful things (this is me talking now, thank you Wikipedia), among many other beautiful things Scully paints large canvasses of juxtaposed rectangles of varying sizes, creating vibrant territories of colors and shapes that are deeply meaningful to look at.

Recently I took this photo of Scully’s “Wall of Light” sculpture at Château La Coste, a stunning modern-art open-air collection (and winery) in the south of France.

Scully is very successful, you know? He’s, you know, accomplished and probably, almost certainly very well-off (“rich”), you know? His 2006 show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York was, like, so amazing it made me feel like I was, like, a single hair on the skull of a bald gnat, you know? Scully can do a lot of things that I can’t do and will never be able to do, you know? The only way I could feel better about myself would be for Sean Scully to fail. Like, Scully = Skull; Scully is a bald gnat. I’ll never forget his 2006 Met show, or his 1996 show at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Scully won’t let me forget Scully.

If I were to envy Scully, I’d wish him ill; I’d use my thoughts of him to diminish myself; I wouldn’t “see” his work, I’d only see the difference between the vast scale of his accomplishments and of his life, and the not-so-vast scale of my own life. I’d eat rotten moldy Parmesan for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The cure for envy is to look away from someone’s success, accomplishments, fame, and riches, and instead to look at his or her human qualities and artistic processes; to look away from externals and toward internals; to look away from “where someone else is” and instead to ponder “where you are yourself, and where you want to go, and how you’re going to get there.” Then Sean Scully becomes a source not of envy but of motivation; he becomes your guide, teacher, and friend.

I’m using the words “Sean Scully” to mean anyone who’s accomplished and successful, right? A symbol of a phenomenon, so to speak. I’ve never met Scully and I don’t know how the flesh-and-bones guy really thinks. But it doesn’t change the gist of my argument.

1. Attitude

   Sean Scully is curious about the world, and also about art and human psychology, and also politics and history. To the extent that I can, I’m going to read, study, watch, study, read, and also watch and study. In my free time I’ll read, study, watch, pay attention, and absorb, digest, and integrate information. And I’ll do it not out of duty but out of curiosity, because life itself is endlessly fascinating.

2. Commitment

   Sean Scully works hard and works well. To the extent that I can, I’m going to get out of bed committed to my work day, committed to tasks, committed to processes, committed to step-by-step procedures, committed to the enjoyment of handling my materials and playing with them. I think it was Somerset Maugham (another terribly prolific creative individual) who said that “a change of work is the best rest.” No, wait, it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who said it. Maybe it was Plato. Or perhaps the Entity Preceding Plato.

3. Skill

   Sean Scully is very skillful. To the extent that I can, day by day, moment by moment, I’m going to improve my skills through practice, repetition, trial-and-error, thinking and doing, feeling and doing, exploring and doing. And practicing, did I mention practicing?

4. Growth

   Sean Scully learns and grows. Before he could paint, he couldn’t paint; before he could sculpt, he couldn’t sculpt; before he could make an omelet, he couldn’t make an omelet. I’ll start by making an omelet, and I’ll go from there. I probably have another thirty years left in this life to learn and grow, to the extent that I can. If I haven’t learned all I want to learn by the time I die, I’ll just reincarnate and start again. As long as I don’t reincarnate as a bald gnat, I’ll be okay.

Ah, I was forgetting: fame and riches. They don’t matter.

I visited Google Translate and I did a back-and-forth, translating a snippet from English to Latin, then the resulting snippet back to English, and so on for a few rounds until Google sent me a cease-and-desist order.

©2020, Pedro de Alcantara

I can't remember what this post is about

The other day, some students and I got together online to discuss how we memorize things. In this particular group, all of us were performers, and our ostensible goal was to become better at memorizing the materials we must perform. But the issue is of interest to everyone, performer or not. In fact, memory isn’t even about memory itself.

Here’s an example. I’ve always “had a terrible memory for faces and names,” although I have a first-class memory for facts, numbers, concepts, and choice nuggets from Wikipedia. Depending on context, I can sound as if “I know a lot,” although at the same time “I don’t even know your name,” which means “I don’t know anything, do I!”

What gives? Well, between my innate introversion and the way I was socialized as a child (a big subject that I won’t talk about right now, !ay caramba!), every time I meet a person for the first time I dissociate for a few seconds. I blank out. I have a minor psychotic episode. I go on mental vacation. I run away. The person says his or her name, and I simply don’t hear it because I’m not there. It’s not true that I have a terrible memory for faces and names. I can look at a thousand faces of famous people and name hundreds and hundreds of them. Eleanor Roosevelt. Walt Disney. Otto von Bismarck. Pelé. Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV, the Maharaja of Mysore (maybe, maybe not).

My point is that, behind memory, there lie deep psychological mechanisms, some shared by all individuals, some unique to each individual. Don’t work on improving your memory; work on improving those psychological mechanisms that have been sabotaging your memory.

I’ll use a poem of mine to illustrate my point, and to give you some nifty tools. Keep in mind that (1) this isn’t about memorizing, (2) this isn’t about performing, (3) this isn’t about my poem, (4) this is a list with four items.

What on earth is this poem about? Don’t worry, be happy. I don’t mean that the poem is about not worrying and being happy. I mean that tool #1, the best tool, the most helpful tool is for you not to worry when faced with a task. If you’re worrying, you aren’t paying attention to the task; instead, you’re paying attention to your worry. Let your understanding of the poem arise by itself; let it come to you if and when it comes to you. Don’t make a pact with the Devil just to understand this poem! But if you really must understand the poem, dial 1-800-BEELZEBUB (charges may apply).

The poem has eighteen lines, in three blocks of six lines. We isolate the first block, and we break it up according to its punctuation and its “swing,” as it were. The information immediately becomes easier to absorb and digest (and understand and remember). Tool #2: the display of information affects how you receive the information. You can solve many problems by rearranging information, by moving things around, by “putting space” in between things. The “space” allows your “mind” to “breathe.” (Quote marks were on sale, and “I couldn’t resist” the bargain.) 

What is difficult to say is difficult to remember. You won’t remember a line in a poem by repeatedly mangling it. “You’ll remember the mangling, not the poem!” Leave memorization aside, and instead examine the words and sounds and gestures that are difficult for you. Zero in on a trouble spot. Let’s suppose that the line “Vestiges of stranger peoples” provokes you a little. What exactly are “vestiges”? And how exactly do you pronounce the word? Look it up on the Internet, or ask a friend with a PhD in linguistics. Or fret terribly and judge the poet harshly and say, “Forget it!” Your memory will take that as a command. Tool #3: Take it easy, step by step, word by word, sound by sound, nanotask by nanotask.

You don’t have to enjoy a task in order to perform it well; you can enjoy “yourself” rather than the task. My poem is just an example of a task and how to approach it. If you dislike the poem, or if you despise it, or if you desperately dislike and despise it—hey, this is called “alliteration,” the process of repeating a sound for poetic and musical reasons. Des-dis-des, desss-disss-desss, like the sssserpent in Mowgli. (Kaa. But you knew hisssss name, of coursssssse!) Find the musical patterns, the colorsssss, the things repeated and varied, and you’ll memorize the poem (and the song and the choreography and the equation and the algorithm and the shopping list) more easily. “Fleeting tenuous tangent” has four tee sounds, for instance. “As to appear nearly one” repeats the sound “ear,” app-EAR n-EAR-ly one. My poem has a bunch of such patterns. Tool #4: Enjoy “yoursssssself.”

A scene in The Jungle Book involving Kaa the snake. haha

Pattern recognition is a vital skill, which we spend our lives learning and refining. The newborn is practically a pattern-recognition machine, cataloguing similarities and differences: “humans and non-humans,” “parents and non-parents,” “nipple, like a nipple, unlike a nipple spit it out bleargh.” The baby invests a tremendous amount of attention in her pattern recognition. And the baby learns sensorially first, and intellectually second. The world is a kaleidoscopic maze of interlocked patterns. Your job is to (1) enjoy the kaleidoscope with all your senses, and (2) not get dizzy as the kaleidoscope turns. Then you’ll remember the similarities and differences, “by heart.” Tool #5: By memory, by heart, by lungs, by arms and hands and legs and feet. Toes too. They are nipple-like.

If you know where you’re going, you travel easy. Learn your journey in steps, backward from the destination to the departure. My poem has 18 verses. Start by saying the last verse (18) all by itself. Then say the last two verses (17, 18). Then say the last three verses (16, 17, 18). Keep going in the same fashion all the way to the first verse.

• 18. less than line, a single point.

• 17. for a fleeting tenuous tangent—

• 18. less than line, a single point.

• 16. and to hope, despite design,

• 17. for a fleeting tenuous tangent—

• 18. less than line, a single point.

• 15. to get lost, to find yourself,

• 16. and to hope, despite design,

• 17. for a fleeting tenuous tangent—

• 18. less than line, a single point.

By the time you finish the exercise, you’ll have said the last verse a total of eighteen times, and you’ll know it as well as your own first name and your left big toe. You’ll also know the verse before it really well, and the one before it too, and the one before it too also. And when you declaim the poem from the beginning, every verse gives you more confidence than the verse before, “since you know exactly where you’re going.” It feels good to feel good, doesn’t it? Tool #6: Forward and backward, backward and forward. The alphabet starts with Zee.

You recite that poem line by line, from the end to the beginning. How long does it take? Depending on your speed, about two minutes. You’ll get bored! Distracted! Annoyed! Check emails, click likes, chew gum! You won’t remember the poem, but the chewing gum. Stay with the poem for two minutes. For two minutes, stay with the poem. Stay for two minutes with the poem. Every word meaningful, every verse invested with your attention and your care. Then you’ll remember your care and your attention, and you’ll love yourself for being such a caring and attentive person, and—sure, you’ll know the poem inside out. Tool #7: Love. L-O-V-E. Noun and verb, reflexive and personal.

“In grammar, a reflexive verb is, loosely, a verb whose direct object is the same as its subject.”

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

 ©2020, Pedro de Alcantara

Use your words, honey!

Life is full of the most amazing spectacles. A little kid—little, little, a real little little kid—learning her mother tongue . . . it’s amazing. Even before she can say a word, she understands a tremendous amount. You can talk to the baby, and the baby understands you. I mean, you might not ask the baby what she thinks of the Objective Collapse Model in quantum physics. But my point is that the baby understands a lot, thinks a lot, senses a lot, and knows a lot of words before she says her first sentence. Which is probably going to be “That Schrödinger kitty had better be alive, or I’m going to cry. Pass the bottle, please.”

Suppose the baby is about two or three years old now. We’ll call her Mileva. She speaks normally for someone her age (kitty and bottle, yes; Schrödinger, probably not). And she gets upset at something. Her mother accuses her of drawing equations on the living room wall. The injustice of it! Mileva gets really, really upset, and rightly so. She cries, screams, yells, sobs, kicks the equation. And her mom says, “Use your words, honey. Use your words.” And Mileva—she’s really little, and she’s really upset—well, Mileva finds a few words. “It’s unfair. I didn’t do it. The kitty did it, in all probability. If he’s alive. Which I hope he is.” Bwaaaaaaaah.

Mileva might not formulate her defense so astutely, but she will find words, and she will articulate her strong emotions, and she will rebut her mother successfully. And she will grow up to be an intelligent, alert, and sensitive speaker, with a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words, and the skill of mixing and matching her words in potentially millions and billions of different combinations.

Vocabulary comes from the Latin “vox,” which means voice, and which comes from an even earlier root, *wekw, which in Proto-Indo-European means to speak. It’s all related: a vocabulary gives you voice and helps you speak. Here’s a screenshot from my favorite website, www.etymonline.com.

I’d like to propose a theory about words. Like all theories, it’s absolutely true! For me, anyway, and that’s why I’m sharing it with you!

Let’s take the word complex, as in, “Pedro, your blog posts are painfully complex.” We’ll look it up in www.etymonline.com and copy and paste the definition, visually reformatting it a little bit.

How nifty is that? Something complex is something that weaves and braids and entwines multiple strands into an intricate and encompassing whole.

The more you look into a word, the richer the word becomes. A word’s roots are particularly enriching, because they invite you to see or to imagine the word’s deeper meanings. We’ll go further in, and we’ll look “to plait” up.

And that’s my theory about words. We start with a word in English; its immediate root is often French; the root of the root tends to come from Latin or Greek; the root of the root of the root comes from Proto-Indo-European; and the root of the root of the root of the root comes from eternity and is an archetypal notion.

The archetype is a universal, timeless, fundamental, all-embracing, all-encircling concept or energy that manifests itself in numberless forms. In this case, plait and plaiting are “manifested” in the term complexity. But plaiting, braiding, weaving, and folding manifest themselves in multiple ways, physically and symbolically, in our lives. To be alert to the underlying similarity of these manifestations—that is, their archetype—is to be alert to the promise of coherence.

When you embody this promise, your daily existence takes on a quasi-mystical hue, because you start seeing relationships among seemingly disparate activities: folding a piece of paper, plaiting your daughter’s hair, crossing your fingers, weaving your arguments and examples into a blog post . . . despite their tremendous diversity, all these activities are children of the goddess *Plek.

And the moral of this complex story?

Words are your friends. Roots are the friends of words. Archetypes are the friends of roots.

The more words, the more friends!

©2020, Pedro de Alcantara. I took all photos at the Place des Vosges in central Paris.

Enter the innermost circle

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

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

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

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

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

But then I got thinking.

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

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

Feliz aniversário, Luis Eduardo!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turn the sound up. Impermanence is marvelous and terrifying.

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

©2020, Pedro de Alcantara

Daffy does his laundry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looney Tunes Daffy Duck GIF from Looneytunes GIFs

©2020, Pedro de Alcantara

(*) You may burp, brother!

Let me count the ways

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

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

The science on this is irrefutable.

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

Jewish Wedding Jewish Dance GIF from Jewishwedding GIFs

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2020, Pedro de Alcantara

A Talent for Becoming Talented

What is talent?

Warning! This is not an innocent question!

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

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

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

What is talent?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2020, Pedro de Alcantara 

I wouldn't do that if I were you

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

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

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

It’s about the fear of ridicule.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fear of Ridicule

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Relax.

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

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

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

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

©2020, Pedro de Alcantara