Life's an accordion

All day you shrink and you expand. It’s a natural process that you can’t avoid. You might as well embrace it.

You get out of the shopping mall only to find out that somebody has parked too close to you. You can only enter your car by making yourself smaller than your habitual self. You might be annoyed and unwilling, but you’re going to become a boneless marshmallow anyway, because either you shrink-to-enter-and-drive-away or you don’t go anywhere.

A mosquito is resting on the wall behind your bed, all the way up near the ceiling. The mosquito has just drunk a quart of your precious blood, and you’re going to expand in body and in mind, and with a paperback book from your nightstand (Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) you’ll stretch heavenward and take revenge. If you could see a movie of yourself reaching for the mosquito, you’d be amazed at how big you suddenly look, how long, how strong.

Can you pass through a tight space when you’re that big, that long, that strong? Try it, and if you survive the experience send us a report.

It's not just mosquitos and drivers that make you shrink and expand. Ride the subway at rush hour and you’ll make yourself an “invisible gray cabbage,” to coin an expression. People will be pushing into you front and back, left and right. To avoid even the impression of intimacy, you’ll dial down your energy field, “as if you were a vegetable.” You don’t have to be a cabbage; rutabaga works well, too. The word “rutabaga” comes from the Swedish for “lump.”

You’re at a vernissage when you catch sight of your ex, who’s suing you for alimony, mental-distress damages, and custody of the remaining parakeet. You “disappear,” even if you stay in the gallery. Or you’re at a vernissage when you see an art dealer you’d like to impress. You “appear.” It’s absolutely essential for you, and for all of us, to know how to appear and to disappear according to the needs of the situation.

Thoughts alone can make you shrink or expand. Memories of a dental procedure make you shrink. Memories of a beach holiday make you expand. The same stimulus can make some people expand and others, shrink. I know lots of people who automatically shrink if you give them a compliment. To them, “expanding under compliment” would be wrong, inappropriate, and immoral. It might be useful for them to work through this issue and become better able not to shrink automatically.

Control your shrinking and expanding self, and you control your life. Let’s make some extravagant claims without evidence from neuroscience: Many illnesses arise from a dysfunction of your inner shrinking-expanding mechanism (“accordion”). People die of psychic shrinkage, of not reaching out, of not fulfilling their destinies, of not occupying the space they need in order to breathe, move, learn, and grow.

From my favorite website, www.etymonline.com

People also die of misdirected psychic expansion, of ego inflation, of hubris (which is Greek for “run riot”). Career success is accordion virtuosity, matching your talents to the twisting paths that take you forward. Existential equilibrium comes from comfort with the cycle of inflation and deflation, both of which are necessary. It’s their interplay that “makes music,” and it’s their music that “makes you dance.” Commitment and distance, in and out, up and down, yes and no, now and later; ocean tides, the workings of lungs and heart, bursts of activity and rest, effort and depletion, decay and rebirth are all manifestations of the Accordion Principle.

Here's a famous Jewish proverb: “Too modest is half proud.” You don’t do yourself or anyone else any favors by calling attention to how good you are at shrinking, so good but oh-so-good that you deserve a medal. If you’re a mensch, shrink authentically.

And here’s a famous proverb from my native Brazil: “Mosquito inflate, mosquito deflate.” That’s a rough translation, of course; back home we say “Sucker bloater splatter croaker, hasta la vista capitalista.”

From my favorite website, www.etymonline.com

Bubble Bubble, Spare me the Trouble

Six years ago, I was practicing the piano in preparation for taking a lesson when I had a sudden idea: How about I write a piano method? This seemed absurd on many levels. For instance, back then I really didn’t play the piano well. Writing a piano method was as plausible as writing a brain surgery manual. “Buy a melon. Sharpen a knife. Practice cutting it. No, dummy! Don’t cut the knife, cut the melon! And don’t sever the melon’s optic nerve!”

Oxford University Press is bringing it out in May, 2023. 48 pedagogical video clips, more than a hundred performance clips. Melons, mangoes, overripe peaches, cherries. Did you know that cherry juice looks very similar to blood?

The method is called Creative Health for Pianists: Concepts, Exercises & Compositions. It’s less absurd than you think. First, you can learn a lot in six years. It’s pretty much like med school. You go in thinking that babies are delivered by storks to a cabbage patch next to the parking lot of the maternity ward, and you come out knowing about the bees and the mangoes. Pollination is procreation. Babies R Us. By the time of publication, my own piano playing will be unrecognizable from where it was back when I had my sudden idea. It has “grown,” you know.

Also, “creative health” isn’t “flashy piano technique.” Did I call my method “flashy piano technique”? No. I called it Brain Surgery Without Anesthetics: Find a Willing Melon. It’s very tempting to think that a piano method necessarily focuses on the nitty-gritty of physical technique. But my whole endeavor really has to do with the creative process, the choices that you make when confronted with a stimulus, the broadening of your field of perception, the lessening of fear and doubt regarding your progress. It’s quite simple: You Aren’t the Melon, You’re the Surgeon. Fear Not!

And what is this thing about having a sudden idea? You were sitting at the piano and a light bulb went on? A bell rang? A mouse squeaked? A balloon popped? A length of bubble wrap committed the one-thousand hara kiri?

That’s right. I was sitting at the piano like a good boy, and a bubble gum pooped on my head. I mean, popped in my head. A sudden idea is actually the sudden removal to an obstacle standing in the way of an idea. It’s a permission, an encouragement, a push. The idea wants to come in, but you aren’t welcoming her. You’re shy, and the idea is very pretty, and you find it hard to talk to pretty ideas. And, poop! I mean, pop! You temporarily let down your defenses, and the idea sees an opportunity and grabs you by the mangoes. You and the idea start dating. Babies R Us! Concepts, exercises, and compositions, lots of them, high fertility and low mortality!

A sudden idea is, essentially, a change of heart. You accept and submit; you accept that writing a piano method is the exact thing that you want to do and should do, and you submit to the impulse to work compulsively for years and years, never complaining, and always pissing and moaning. It’s one thing when the pretty idea is your girlfriend, and another thing when she’s your wife. (I’m not talking about my actual loving wife Alexis, by the way; this is all Symbols and Metaphors, or S&M.) (Let me explain.) (No, please don’t let me explain.)

You can write a method because you know something, or you can write a method because you want to learn something. The writing is part of how you learn. I have a memoir in the works. It’s tentatively titled How I Learned Brain Surgery by Practicing on Myself. So far I only have the first word of first sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter, but I think it’ll be a great book.

©Pedro de Alcantara, 2022

Joy of Pacing

You can rush to a meeting. You can run to catch a bus, or run on a treadmill, or run after your dog. You can walk from your home to the pharmacy down the block and back. You can walk from the museum to the movie theater, taking 45 pleasant minutes to get there. You can meander through a street market, forgetting the passing of time. These are all activities involving some sort of locomotion on your two legs. They vary in speed, rhythm, and duration, and each creates a particular flow of psychic energy. You really don’t think and feel the same way when you rush to a meeting or when you meander around the neighborhood, although both are “bipedal locomotive activities,” to coin a term.

I live in Paris, and walking is a big part of my daily life. There’s the bakery and the pharmacy, of course, but also the movie theater and the museum, and also the Place des Vosges where I walk rounds, sometimes alone and sometimes with my wife, sometimes with my camera and sometimes carrying nothing. And when I travel, I walk as a tourist or informal explorer. Most recently I “walked Athens,” up and down the Acropolis, all around the historical neighborhoods, to my professional appointments and back to my AirBnB. Next up on my walking calendar are Strasbourg, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Minneapolis, and New York.

But right now I want to tell you about another bipedal locomotive activity: pacing. It’s totally different from rushing, running, walking, or meandering. I sometimes pace my own small apartment in Paris, and sometimes just the rug in my living room. I like working in cafés and hotel lobbies, and sometimes I pace the lobby. And sometimes I leave the café and pace up and down the block before resuming my work session.

Pacing has its own rhythm and speed, and also its geographical constraints. For me, a certain amount of “back and forth” is obligatory for proper pacing. I don’t pace an endless straight line, but I pace from this wall to that wall, and back, and again, or on a loop if I’m at a terrace or garden outside. The space doesn’t have to be tiny; I pace city blocks in Paris, but—you know, back and forth, back and forth. The “turning around” that a spatial constraint requires plays a role in how pacing affects my psychic energy.

Pacing allows me to think and feel. It invites introspection, reflection, some distance from displeasures and challenges. Trying to write a coherent paragraph and struggling with it, I leave the computer behind and I pace—for a few seconds, or for a minute or two or five. Sometimes while coaching a client face-to-face, I pace the room while the client is accomplishing a task or doing his or her own thinking-and-feeling.

Pacing organizes and releases psychic energy. Do you need to let go of something inside yourself? Go pace for a while. Do you need to digest an emotional event, or to slow down some inner agitation? Go pace. Do you need to feel your own animality in body, back, legs, feet, arms? Go pace. Do you need to figure out what has been distracting you all morning? Go pace. The distraction might dissipate, or you might suddenly realize what was causing it: an unremembered dream, or an obligation you’ve been avoiding without knowing that you were avoiding it.

Pacing, I sense the world and I sense myself in the world. Pacing, I come up with ideas and insights, solutions to problems, and sometimes problems to solutions. Yes, it’s very useful to figure out what kinds of problems may be solved from a solution that came to you while you were pacing. You don’t have to “create” a problem, you “locate” it instead. Believe it or not, the word “pace” comes from a Proto-Indo-European root (meaning a word from six thousand years ago) that means “to spread.” Although I often feel myself spreading psychically when pacing, I also use pacing to contain myself—that is, to gather my psychic energies, the better to structure them. Pacing is rooting, grounding, and spreading all at the same time.

More than ten years ago, I paced the Noguchi Museum in New York City for two hours. I had been having a busy and somewhat stressful time, and the museum visit marked the end of the busyness and the stress. It was a cold winter morning with clear blue skies, my favorite weather. Isamu Noguchi was a Japanese-American sculptor who, among other things, created marvelous stone rings, fountains, spirals, and gardens. His museum is located in his former atelier and studio, and it has the feel of a temple—to beauty, to craft, to timelessness in a modern setting. A dear friend accompanied me on this visit, and we found a rhythm that worked for both of us as we walked and talked, walked in silence, walked and absorbed the energies of the place. I felt—I really did feel!—that Noguchi himself was giving me a healing treatment, from the stone floor of his studio upward. At the end of two hours of steady pacing I was made new.

For fans of numbered lists (and I am such a fan myself), here it is.

  1. Pacing is always walking, but walking isn’t always pacing.

  2. It takes certain personality traits to enjoy pacing. It’d be a tragedy if pacing made you frustrated and murderous. Try it at home when there’s no one around. Then decide whether it’s safe to go pace an art gallery downtown.

  3. If you need precise instructions before you pace, then you aren’t pacing: you’re marching.

  4. Rhythm is important, plus some degree of spatial constraint that invites you or forces you to turn around.

  5. I like the concept of psychic energy, which is different from physical, mental, or emotional energy. Unfortunately, it’d take too long to define it at this point.

  6. Pacing isn’t goal-directed, but it can be very fruitful.

  7. Barefoot on a sunny terrace when it’s not too hot; cotton socks caressing a smooth wooden floor; shoes that fit, footwear that you identify with. Comfort helps pacing, and it speeds up the release of psychic energy.

©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

Mistakes, period!

It’s a mistake to think that mistakes exist.

Wrap your brain around that, and if you recover from it, read on.

The Cambridge dictionary defines a mistake as “an action, decision, or judgment that produces an unwanted or unintentional result.” Merriam-Webster calls it “a wrong judgment: MISUNDERSTANDING; a wrong action or statement proceeding from faulty judgment, inadequate knowledge, or inattention.” Collins says it’s “an error or blunder in action, opinion, or judgment, a misconception or misunderstanding.”

It'd be a mistake to invite Cambridge, Webster, and Collins to your party. They’d pick endless fights on the definition of every last thing.

Cambridge: “A mistake depends on how you define it, you moron!”

Collins: “You’re wrong and mistaken, you snotty snob!”

Webster: “Your fly is undone, unless I misunderstand it.”

A while ago, a pianist friend of mine told me a story. Somebody she knew had attended a violin-and-piano recital given by two established professionals. The pianist seemed disoriented part of the time; he would stop playing for long stretches, and the violinist would continue by herself until the pianist caught up with her and rejoined the music-making.

Crazy, huh? Collins: “The pianist made a tremendous number of mistakes. He shouldn’t perform in public.”

But the person who related the story to my friend said that the recital was deeply affecting, quite remarkable, troubling, strange and wonderful. Cambridge: “What the hell are you talking about?”

Our friends the Dictionnaires Doctrinaires attach words like “wrong, misunderstanding, misconceptions, errors, blunders, inadequate knowledge, and your fly is undone” to the notion of mistake.

I’ll put my neck out (Webster: “You’re making a mistake, Pedro!”) and redefine mistake as “an event that carries information, period!” Period and exclamation mark, of course!

Information is neutral. It’s the interpretation of information that might give rise to a judgment of right or wrong, good or bad, stroke of genius or fatal mistake.

Music is being made in a certain way: that’s an event, carrying a lot of information. You sit there, watching and listening: you, too, are “an event,” in and of yourself; you, too, are “information.” The outside and the inside interact: the event-that-is-a-performance and the event-that-is-you-yourself-attending-a-performance; the information out there and the information in there. The informational interaction creates meaning, emotions, connections, memories; the interaction is propagated beyond the physical limits of the two interlaced events. You’re reading a blog post about an event which I heard about from a friend who heard about it. And you’ll comment on it or share the post with a friend, an enemy, or a frenemy (depending on your inner dictionary). Where’s the mistake?

Zeno and Plato met in a bar. “It's a mistake to think that mistakes exist,” they said in unison, making absolutely no mistakes in intonation or rhythm. Socrates rolled his eyes, and Aristotle married Jacqueline Kennedy, née Bouvier, henceforth known as Jackie O.

Cambridge, Collins, and Webster: “Basta, Pedro!”

©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

Questionable Cookies

12 Questionable Fortune Cookies from the Mistake Pavilion Restaurant and Teahouse

  1. Are today’s mistakes better than yesterday’s?

  2. Would you make a fatal mistake on purpose if it saved the life of your loved ones?

  3. What do you prefer, making zero mistakes or making a thousand mistakes?

  4. Can a newborn make mistakes?

  5. Are mistakes Instagrammable?

  6. Is it a crime to strangle a mistake and spit on its grave?

  7. What tools do you need to make mistakes with?

  8. If you let go of a mistake, where does it end up?

  9. Why did the mistake cross the road?

  10. Is it a mistake to ask this question?

  11. If a mistake calls, do you answer?

  12. Is there a discount if you buy mistakes by the dozen?

©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

Swimming in the whole

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a new thing, I’m telling you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, yeah? Connection to what?”

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

©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

The Tragicomedy

The tragicomedy of too much and not enough.

  1. Too much thinking, and you’ll slice your finger instead of the tomato. Not enough thinking, and you’ll slice your other finger instead of the tomato. In the push-and-pull of thinking and not thinking you shall slice the tomato.

  2. Too much wanting, and you’ll get in the way of what you want. Not enough wanting, and you’ll stay in bed all day, every day. It’ll get moldy. I mean, you will get moldy. In Bhutanese, happiness is called “Want-no-want.”

  3. Too much ego, and you’re an insufferable megalomaniac. Not enough ego, and you’re some sort of overripe banana. A fruit fly has more personality than you.

  4. Too much time, and you become dispersed and lazy. Not enough time, and you become agitated or paralyzed. The exact amount of time is also known as “now.”

  5. Too much technique, and you become a machine operated by AI. Not enough technique, and you become a banana operated by a fruit fly without a pilot’s license. By the way, defining “technique” isn’t easy.

  6. Too much sharing, and you’re an exhibitionist. It’s against the law. Not enough sharing, and you’re a hermit in a cave full of fruit flies. It should be against the law.

  7. Too much light, and you’re blinded. Not enough light, and you don’t see a thing. This also applies to you as a person: show light and dark, and you’ll be seen as being completely human.

©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

I can't, I can!

Your ability to do something is closely connected with your willingness to do it. Very often, when people say “I can’t do that” they really mean “I’m not willing to do that.” I think it’s useful to see or perceive the distinction between two types of “I can’t,” and their corollary, the two types of “I can.”

I apologize for using a relatively complicated word this early in the post. Corollary is “an idea that naturally flows from a different idea, maybe because of a parallel linkage, let’s say.” It also means “Pedro, why do you keep inflating your linguistic balloon? Go TikTok yourself!”

I apologize for having apologized.

Back in my native land, Take-off-your-bra-bra-zil, I had English classes in secondary school and in high school. How well do you learn a language if you don’t immerse yourself fully in the learning of it? When I was 19, I landed in the US for my university studies and found out the bitter truth. I understood little and spoke even less. Listening to my colleagues and not understanding them, I thought that the word “stuff” (which I wasn’t familiar with) was probably a swear word. “You’ll sink or swim,” I remember a friendly colleague telling me during Orientation Week, the first week of the first semester of the first year of my kicking-and-screaming attempt to grow up. Sink or swim? What is that supposed to mean??????

Growing up remains to be tackled, but at least I swam and learned English: “Me speak English goody, sehr sehr gut!” Later on I learned French, which I speak about as well as I speak English. Now I’m learning Spanish, and getting comfortable with it. Here’s an example: “Buenos días, señor.”

There is a vast number of languages that I don’t speak, including many about which I know literally nothing. I can’t speak Khowar, Maiya, or Komi, and I don’t even know where they are spoken. I plucked them from an Internet list of languages in danger of extinction.

But here’s the thing: I’m willing to make a fool of myself and pretend to speak Khowar. I’ll make funny sounds and faces. Gestures, postures, emotions. I’ll start crying, then I’ll do jumping jacks while singing “Ô Khowar Land of Purple Mangoes,” the national anthem. It’s all phony and it has nothing to do with Khowar, but I say “yes” to playacting and hallucinating, to suspending my discernment and my judgment, to lowering or even extinguishing my standards. Yes, I can speak Khowar!

Then I’ll go on YouTube and see what Khowar actually sounds like. I’ll find some wonderful clips right away, and I’ll regret having made jokes about a foreign culture, even though I used the word “Khowar” as nothing but a trigger for improvisation. The trigger could have been “Flemish,” or “Appalachian,” or “Brasiloser” (which I speak pretty well, actually). (I had some Brasiloser ancestors.) (They slipped coming out of the shower, fell, broke their necks, and died.) (Together.) (Brasiloser family life is . . . you know . . . very intimate.)

Let’s lay out a quaternity: two groups of two elements each, arranged like a cross or like the four cardinal points. The elements within a group are closely related, similar to Brasiloser cousins. The two groups are in some sort of dynamic pull, interacting with each other. Structured in this manner, a quaternity delineates a territory in which you find out who you are. What’s your relationship with “I can” and “I can’t”? What’s your relationship with “I say yes” and “I say no"? These relationships interact in a lot of complex ways, and they determine many things in your life. Many things, most things, maybe everything in your life.

I really, really, really can’t speak Khowar and probably never will. In some situations today, I feel nervous about speaking Spanish, because—well, I have bouts of self-conscious standards. Perfectionist worrying about other people. Comfort zone issues. Temporary shyness. Hypoglycemia. I Have My Reasons Syndrome. ¡Tarado de mentecato de badulaque de babieca de bodoque de barbeta! (This is “Pedro” in Spanish.) (I looked it up.)

Can I or can I not speak Spanish? Precisely.

“I can and I can’t,” “I say yes and I say no” are intertwined in the realm of identity, where reason and unreason take a shower together and slip on the soapy surface, sometimes breaking their necks and sometimes aguamoosing.

Translation, please! In life, few things are straightforward. Ultimately, it’s quite heroic to dwell in the demanding quaternity of “I can and I can’t,” having to make endless “I say yes or I say no” decisions that affect you and everyone else around you. In Brasiloser, “life” is pronounced “soapy can-can’t cha-cha-cha.” It’s the most dangerous and the most exhilarating of all dances.

The passage

Our lives are made of our deeply held feelings about what we can or can’t do. Let’s riff on it.

  1. “I can’t perform brain surgery. I mean, really!” I can’t either. The list of things we literally can’t do is extremely long. And that’s okay! The brain surgeon can’t whistle, but we can!

  2. “I can’t fly a plane, of course. I’ve had no training whatsoever.” Sure. But from time to time we read in the news that a passenger with no training was able to land a plane safely, with help from the control tower, after the pilot passed out. Some things we really totally can’t do; others we might become able to do in special circumstances. We don’t know the true limits of our talents and capabilities.

  3. “I can’t draw, never could. Never, never, never.” You might feel certain of that, until the day you actually hold a pencil in your tender fingers and use it to caress a sheet of paper with. “Whaaaat? I can draw?” Some of our certainties are lies that we tell ourselves, and the lies are often supported by an elaborate intellectual and emotional scaffolding. Demolish the scaffolding, dissolve the lie, deny the I can’t!

  4. “I can’t speak, I have no voice.” But I just heard you say, out loud, “I can’t speak, I have no voice!” I think what you mean is, “I’m uncomfortable speaking in public and I don’t enjoy the sensations of my own breath and my own vocal cords.” The subconscious listens to what you say, and takes your statements as commands. If you say “I can’t speak,” the subconscious will obey your command and prevent you from speaking. Instead, say “I want to be more comfortable. Where do I start?” You’ll receive a sign, most likely!

  5. “I can’t wear that shirt.” What will happen, exactly, if you put the shirt on and get out of the house? Will you cause a car crash? Will lightening strike you? Likes and dislikes evolve toward can’s and can’t’s, to coin an expression. I too dislike many types of clothing. And I wouldn’t want to cause a car crash. Recently I’ve started wearing patterned shirts, after many years of wearing nothing but solids. Clothing is part of our identity. I’m glad I’m opening up.

  6. “I can’t resign from my horrible job, where a monstrous boss and a gang of toxic co-workers make my life miserable.” Jobs are important. Or, to put it more broadly, having or earning enough money to survive is important. But suppose you quit the job and sell the house and move to a small rental studio on the edge of downtown, and you get enough money from the house sale to not worry about rent for three years. Then you get a part-time job at a bakery within walking distance of your rental studio and, hey, I’m poor and I’m absolutely ecstatic! It’s not easy to undergo revolutionary change. A monkish lifestyle isn’t for everyone. Strangely, living without strife isn’t for everyone either.

  7. “I can’t be happy. My mother would be terribly hurt if I was happier than her, more dynamic, more fulfilled.” Ah, revolutionary change again! It takes a lot of inner work to get to the point where your wellbeing is the most important thing in your life, the thing that you nourish constantly, THE thing. Parental, familiar, and societal expectations are a big source of I can’t. The passage from I can’t to I can is, symbolically, a departure from the family and the society that impose its restrictions on you. Separation anxiety is guaranteed.

We are all in the grip of I can’t, in some way or another, or in many ways. I’m no exception. My anecdotes don’t mean that I go about my day singing “I can, I can, I can!” I’m just acknowledging a big phenomenon (which affects every human being without exception), systematizing it to some degree, and telling some jokes to see if you and I manage to defeat some of these handicapping I can’t’s.

“Believe you can and you're halfway there.” — Theodore Roosevelt

Nobody understands me

Warning: The author washes his hands. It’s not his fault. It’s the blog post who doesn’t know his elbow from his knee.

Let’s honor Aristotle and start in media res. (In his Poetics, Aristotle advised storytellers to start their tale in the middle of the third round, where you’re bleeding from a cut above your left eye and your opponent is already claiming victory. If only he knew!)

A book can be a labyrinth. Even a single paragraph: you get in, and you can’t get out. Perhaps you’re distracted, not reading closely; or perhaps the paragraph is truly confusing in and of itself. Covering too many subjects at the same time, long sentences, foreign concepts poorly translated into the language you’re reading right now. Or a fancy word used correctly, but you don’t know the word and it trips you up. The writer may be attempting to share an insight about your view of the world, your particular mental operating system, and he calls it your Weltanschauung. Yes, it’s used in English, it’s in the dictionary! Webster’s, I swear! Look it up! And try to pronounce it before you press the little button that pronounces it for you.

A blog post can be like a labyrinth, and then you can say it’s “labyrinthine.” Yes, it’s a word, I swear! Okay, Pedro, no need to swear. We get it.

It’s useful to know the word “labyrinthine,” because it saves you from some horrendous synonyms, like “daedal” or “involute.” I had never heard of those two words until I started researching this post.

A fictional world in literature or cinema is often labyrinthine. You enter it and you get lost. Let’s take William Faulkner, for instance, and the unpronounceable county he invented—

No, wait! Let’s not take Faulkner. Instead, let’s backtrack. I’ve decided that “daedal” is a fine word after al; I’ve learned more about it since I first mentioned it. It refers to Daedalus, the father of Icarus and the builder of the Cretan labyrinth that housed the minotaur.

I don’t know much about Faulkner, because whenever I’ve tried to read one of his novels in the past I got totally lost after less than a page. But this proves, proves! that his work is like a labyrinth. Music, cinema, literature, philosophy, the rules of baseball, theology, dating, and IKEA instructions are exactly alike, because they all tend toward the daedal. Dating is worse than theology, but IKEA is worse than dating. I’m grateful that I’m married, and to a woman who enjoys following IKEA instructions.

Suppose that you’re in great pain and you rush yourself to an emergency room at a hospital where everyone is super-busy and super-stressed, besides being badly paid, poorly trained, drunk, and sadistic. Suppose you say, “My knee! For the love of God, inject my knee with cortisone! More, more, more!” And suppose you have long thought that the knee is “the elbow of the leg,” and—and in comes the needle, and the cortisone destroys your healthy knee, because you really meant the inflamed elbow. Not that other elbow down there, this one up here! You know, the knee of my arm, not the elbow of my leg!

The above paragraph is purely fictional. Never in American hospitals do doctors and nurses make mistakes, never ever! Except in Yoknapatawpha County.

But my point, supposing that I have a point, is that vocabulary is quite important. Don’t say “knee” when you mean “elbow.” And don’t say “labyrinth” when you mean “maze.”

Back when Daedalus was designing a complicated habitation for a half-man, half-bull monster, that type of building was called a labyrinth—by some people, anyway. Sooner or later, other people started saying that a labyrinth has only one entry point and one path toward its center. The path may be twisty and scary, if you wish; but it’s one path and one path only, plus it’s not really meant to confuse you but rather to get you to meditate about the meaning of life and, ultimately, to shift your Weltanschauung. A maze, however, has many entry points and many paths, including some that result in dead-ends, blind alleys, and cul-de-sacs (which really should be called culs-de-sac, but not souls-de-quack). Technically, the labyrinth is unicursal, the maze is multicursal. And the maze is, in fact, designed to confuse you—unlike this blog post, which is labyrinthine (and therefore trying to help you shift your you-know-what).

You hear what I’m saying? Since I was a newborn I’ve been using the word labyrinth, but apparently I was referring to what some other newborns call a maze.

Cortisone, please! And lots of it!

©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

PS Some languages don’t have separate words for labyrinth and maze. ¡Maldito laberinto que no me deja dormir!

On the art of collaboration

My piano method, an ambitious undertaking that I’ve been working on for five years, received its final approval from my editor and is now under production. We don’t have a publication date yet, but let’s invent it: May 31, 2023.

Writing, revising, editing, producing, and publishing are a collaborative endeavor. My piano method, for instance, involves an acquiring editor, multiple anonymous readers who determine whether or not the method should be published, a project manager, a copy editor, a layout designer, a cover designer, a marketing team, and others still. I thought I’d share a few observations regarding the ins and outs of teamwork.

  1. You’re human, imperfect, and perfectible. So are your collaborators. It’s a little inhuman for you to expect or demand that your collaborators be perfect.

  2. Keep an invisible Post-it foremost in your mind, listing some of the flaws and gaps in your professionalism. Not replying quickly to important emails; misplacing files or documents; writing confusing paragraphs; neglecting duties and tasks. These are just some examples in the abstract. The idea isn’t for you to beat yourself up with these flaws, only to remember that you’re imperfect and perfectible, like all humans.

  3. It’s absolutely incredible that other people are invested in your project and putting lots of time and thought into it. Wake up in wonderment and gratitude, and go to sleep in gratitude and wonderment.

  4. Somebody you’ve never met and might never meet goes home at the end of the work day and says to her partner, “This guy has some interesting ideas. His method is kinda complicated, but I’m enjoying the challenges of laying it out. I think it’s going to be good.” It’s possible, right?

  5. Over the decades, my editors at Oxford University Press saved my a** on several occasions. One day about 20 years ago they rejected a project proposal outright. And you know what? The project wasn’t ready, and I wasn’t ready. I took ten years to re-think and re-write the project, which was then accepted and published. A collaborator says “No, Pedro!” and it turns out to be a very positive thing.

  6. Your collaborators have skills that you don’t have, life experiences that you don’t have, insights that you don’t have. In my opinion, it’s very difficult for an individual to truly assess and appreciate the totality of another individual. It’s good to accept that you don’t know exactly what the other person is really like. Then you won’t rush to judgment.

  7. Sometimes it all works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But one thing is for sure: without collaborators, there is no project.

Rodin is alive!

Think. Don’t think. Pay attention to other people. Ignore other people. Your goals determine your behavior. Your behavior impedes the achievement of your goals. Plan. Improvise. The artist is dead. The artist is immortal.

On a recent Sunday afternoon I visited the Rodin Museum in central Paris. My brother-in-law and his family were in town, and we all went there, together with my wife Alexis. While at the Museum I had an interesting experience. Or, to put it more precisely, I experienced yet again the twisty incomprehensible marvelousness of life.

I brought a fresh sketchpad with me, a spiral-bound, A5-sized little thing with 50 blank sheets, perfectly ordinary. (There’s nothing ordinary about sketching, nor about the entire chain of people and events that causes a friendly sketchbook to be in my hands, to be “mine.” Perfectly extraordinary!) I thought I’d draw one sketch per sheet for the whole pad, a total of 50 sketches produced during this one museum visit.

I probably spent about 75 minutes going from gallery to gallery, then on to the beautiful gardens in the back of the museum. Here’s the method: I’d park myself in front of a sculpture and start sketching immediately. I never looked at a label telling me who made the sculpture and who or what it depicted. Most things were by Rodin, I assume; but it’s possible that some pieces were made by a friend, an enemy, a lover, a teacher, a student, or someone linked to Rodin in some way. On this visit, it didn’t matter in the least. What mattered was my goal—50 sketches—and my process, my choices, my decisions, my behavior, my sketchpad (“mine!”), my pencils, my eyes, my brain, my heart, my history, my past, my present, my future, with an emphasis on my then-present, now-past. I was more important than Rodin, and still am! Forever and ever! And I’m not an egomaniac, now or ever! I’m not saying I’m a better artist than Rodin, I’m only saying that “I” was looking at Rodin’s work, and “I” had a unique perspective and perception—and so did everyone else at the Museum. It’d be impossible for me to look at a sculpture with Rodin’s eyes, or with my wife’s or my niece’s, or a tourist’s. My eyes, and my eyes only. “I am mine.”

I’d choose a sculpture, deciding on which one after a few seconds’ thought. It wasn’t important. Any sculpture would do. I’d park myself in front of the sculpture or next to it, to its side, maybe behind it. It wasn’t important. And I’d sketch for ten seconds, twenty, forty-five seconds. Not important. I’d look without thinking much, and I’d scribble on the sketchpad without thinking much, and I’d capture or try to capture the gist of the sculpture (the gist according to my eyes, past, present, and future), or just have some subjective little head trip, and my hands would go zapty zapty, and I was done! I’d quickly turn the page and go park myself next to another sculpture, zapty zapty done!

I did it 50 times, about 35 or 38 of them inside the museum and the rest around the garden out back. It means I actually achieved the goal I gave myself, oh how disciplined, oh how low-standards, oh how fun.

Some museum goers don’t really look at anything. They amble through the premises, in boredom and impatience, just ticking off the visit on an informal list of things-to-do, places-to-see. Others are more attentive. It’s lovely to see a young parent with a very young child, the child amazed at some strange head or face or object, the parent keeping the child company or perhaps gently helping the child see the strange head. But the main thing is that I’d notice that some people wanted to look at the very sculpture I was sketching, and I’d interrupt my work and let them take my place, and they’d see or not see for a few seconds and move on, and I’d go back to my sketching position and finish my work. I ignored people, and I paid attention to people, and I did both at the same time. It’s a dynamic state of fluid attention, which in my informal neuroscience (I know nothing about the actual science of neuroscience) encourages the flow of love-everyone-dopamine. I loved the little kids looking at the strange heads, I loved the young parents, I loved the bored tourists, I loved Rodin, I loved the blobs that Rodin sculpted, and I loved my sketches, and I loved myself, and in my estimation I’m more important than Rodin, who’s dead and who’s immortal.

I’m almost one-hundred-percent sure that at least one person took a photo or a video of me sketching some blobby blob. And if I’m right, then it’s likely that social media now has a public register of an overweight middle-aged bald short-sighted amateur sketch artist doing a sloppy sketch of a blob in the Rodin Museum. Hey, do you think I interrupted my process to tell the tourist not to video me in my private moment? Hell, no. My process involved the tourist, my process required the tourist to register my process. Unconditional love is “involving.” Plus, my process wasn’t private. I wore my process like I wear a guy-bikini (you know, “show what you’ve got”) (and “it doesn’t have to be pretty”) (and a guy in a guy-bikini “isn’t pretty”) (and the guy-bikini and the mankini aren’t the same “thing”).

At the garden I noticed a young woman (I think she was 17 or so) standing near me, seemingly watching me sketch. And I swear she was smiling. And I swear on Rodin’s grave, may he rest in peace, I swear that the smiling young woman moved on with me when I went to the next sculpture in the garden, and she stood not far from me, slightly behind me, most likely watching how my head trip about Rodin was becoming a few pencil lines on a cheap little sketchpad. “I had a follower.”

But that isn’t important either.

Life is a labyrinth of paradoxes. The ordinary is extraordinary. The dead are immortal. Other people aren’t important, although you love them unconditionally. I think, therefore I am; I don’t think, therefore I sketch. I’m a speck of nothing, and I’m the center of the Universe, which according to certain theories is expanding at an alarming rate. Billions of years ago there was a bang, quite big! One thing led to another, and now I look good in a guy-bikini.

 ©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

First Times

We all know the power of the first time: the first memory, the first kiss, the first trip in an airplane, the first public performance, the first death in the family . . . Every day we do many things for the first time, although it’s not every day that we notice or cherish the first-timeness of the things we’re doing for the first time.

This is the first time I have used the expression “first-timeness,” which of course Goethe plagiarized from me when he wrote Erstezeitlichkeit und die Fünf Bananen in 1804.

Fünf Bananen

But I diverge (Bananen). Today I’d like to talk about some of the first-time things that jostle your awareness and mark you forever and ever, the things that open up your mind, which means the things that proved to you that your mind was closed and you didn’t know it.

In my youth I took lessons in the Alexander Technique with a famous teacher, a significant player in the history and traditions of the profession. Innocently I had imagined, assumed, and determined that the famous and beloved teacher was necessarily a competent expert. Right? Fame, tradition, history, Bananen, you name it. One day she saw me go into a squat to pick up my shoes, and she stopped me cold in mid-flight. “Never do that,” she said sternly. “It’s wrong.” And, pling ka-boom cha-cha-cha! I suddenly understood that she was literal-minded, dogmatic, and judgmental, and I suddenly understood that I had been rather silly in my assumptions. This happened more than 35 years ago, but the experience of the ka-boom has stayed with me, as if I had undergone a secret ritual initiating me into belated incipient adulthood. Believe it or not, Goethe calls it “Verspätet einsetzendes Erwachsensein,” and several characters in his Faust / Eine Tragödie undergo similar rites of passage.

The moral of the story? Make no assumptions. Among the many assumptions you’re better off NOT making, don’t assume that so-and-so is like this-and-that (or, as Sigmund Freud said on the centenary of Goethe’s death, “So-und-so ist wie dies und das.”)

For several decades I lived with the certainty that I had no talent for drawing. I could prove it, absolutely! All I had to do was to draw a crappy stick figure and say, Look! I cannot draw! Roughly 15 years ago, circumstances led me to decide to do one little drawing every night before going to bed. I started by copying photos of family members. The third night, my little drawing of my nephew as a baby came out . . . well . . . kinda super-excellent. I had to accept that I had long lied to myself, and that I had believed the lie with all my heart. The baby of hard truth now stared me in the face: I can draw. I think this was the first very substantial experience of catching myself in the act of telling-a-lie-to-myself-about-myself, which Freud called “Ego Schmego Hasta la Vista Amigo.”

The immoral of the story? If you need to tell a lie, don’t tell it to yourself about yourself! Tell it to Freud about Goethe! Or the other way around! “Von links nach rechts, von rechts nach links!”

I used to think of myself as an intellectual. Some 28 years ago, a participant in one of my workshops told me, “Pedro, you’re the archetypical intuitive.” I resented her, because—hey, intellectuals rank higher than intuitives in the DM-ID: A Clinical Guide for Diagnosis of Mental Disorders in Persons With Intellectual Disability. A real book, I swear! You can buy it on amazon.fr for 1500 euros, and I’m not making this up! It took me many years to embrace the clinical fact that intuition was my primary mode of functioning. But my point is that there was a first time when I heard the news, a shocking first time, an upsetting first time. I wish I could send a valentine to the girl who brought it to my attention, although of course I don’t remember her name, her face, or her Schweinshaxe.

And the amoral of the story? Listen to the herald bringing you good news, shocking or upsetting as the news may be. But don’t listen to what Goethe says about Freud,* because you risk going quite kuku in der Keke.

*”Du bist Bananen.”

©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

Seven Strategies

What do the seven musketeers and the four dwarves have in common? Rhetorical question. No need to answer.

Seriously, we tend to create groups of people, things, and ideas, and the number of elements in the group plays a rule in how we react to the group. The Three Musketeers is the tale that d’Artagnan tells about meeting Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, “the three inseparables.” The Musketeers of legend, then, start as three plus one until they become four, organically.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves are similarly ambiguous: seven plus one, which “is a kind of eight, without being exactly eight.” If we thought of them as eight, rather than seven plus one, their tale would be perverted, immoral, and dirty. Against the law.

Over the years and decades, these specific groupings have made a deep impression in our brains. It’s quite likely that our brains “wanted to be impressed.” Numerical organization makes brains happy. And our brains shall henceforth rebel against seven musketeers and four dwarves. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong.

The Eleven Commandments? No, no, no.

The Thirteen Apostles? No, no, no!

The Hundred and Four Dalmatians? Nooooooooooo!

The Five Cardinal Points? You’re making me dizzy.

But this is only an introduction to the real subject of this blog post. I’ve been very busy with projects, deadlines, tasks, obligations, happenings, duties, pleasures, also tasks and deadlines, plus a whole bunch of projects. Paperwork, admin, correspondence. Shopping, cooking, cleaning. Friendly duties urgently performed for loving friends. Have I mentioned tasks and deadlines?

Thankfully, I have Seven Strategies for S-Dissipating Stress. (I couldn’t find a synonym for “dissipating” starting with “s,” except maybe “squandering.”) Be warned: my strategies work!

1. The worst-case scenario. Most of the time, most of us are pretty much safe from war, plague, earthquakes, and really terrible deadly situations. When it comes to the stresses of daily life and our too-many tasks and obligations, it’s useful to imagine “the worst-case scenario.” I won’t finish the project on time. Or I’ll never finish the project. Or I’ll give up on the project. But I’ll come out of it alive and well. It’s very, very, very reassuring to know that in most situations you’ll come out alive and well.

2. Evacuate. This means, create a space (or void or vacuum, e-vacu-ate) inside yourself, by “getting rid of stuff,”mostly those spiky psychic objects called emotions. You can make lists of the tarantulas eating you up inside and “see them on paper” rather than “feel them in your brain.” The brain becomes clearer when you put stuff down in writing. Or put it down “in speaking.” Talk to people, be they amateurs (spouses, mothers-in-law, passers-by) or professionals (psychotherapists, lawyers, hit men). This too can clear the mind and cause your stress to go either up or down, depending.

3. Rhythm is everything. The late Yogi Berra was a baseball player with a stellar career and the reputation for saying wonderfully paradoxical, Zen-like statements that probably came out of his mouth very different from how they were cooked in his mind. Here’s a famous thing that Yogi Berra definitely never said: “Balls fly like time.”

4. Lower your standards. Rumor has it that a perfect omelet was served to Mademoiselle Angélique Dupont at lunchtime on October 17, 1952, at a now-defunct bistrot in Dijon. The one perfect thing in the whole of history! (And it’s only a rumor.) Approximation, compromise, and an acceptable so-so result for various tasks of yours are all much better than the frantic search for something that doesn’t exist, the bugaboo called perfection. For instance, let your blog post be incoherent! In the worst-case scenario, you’ll lose all your subscribers!

5. Be human, to the extent that you can. Here’s the thing about perfection: To be perfect means to have all qualities, otherwise you’re “incomplete, therefore imperfect.” That means that to be perfect means to be lazy, sloppy, inattentive, repetitive, inattentive, repetitive, sloppy, and lazy SOME OF THE TIME. Using CAPITALS in writing is often considered rude, like you’re shouting. And NO HUMAN BEING EVER SHOUTS! PEDRO, I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!

6. Forgive yourself, then give yourself a medal.

7. Work extremely hard non-stop. Don’t take breaks or naps. Get no assistance from anyone, ever. Don’t read the instruction manual and don’t watch helpful videos on YouTube. Do the work of three people all by yourself. Age as fast as you can, and die young. Rumor has it that death solves many problems. As Yogi Berra didn’t say, “Dead men don’t sweat.”

 ©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

Backstage

Have you visited a supermarket on the day and time when the workers are restocking the shelves? Have you walked by a construction site and inhaled the deep cold smell of freshly poured concrete? Have you entered a building through the service door in the parking garage, and have you gotten lost in a maze of corridors trying to get to an urgent appointment inside the building?

I consider all these experiences to be similar. They give you a connection with the backstage, that is, with the workings of a place, organization, or city. When you attend a play, you see it all “up front” as you sit in the audience and watch the action happening on stage. But behind the scenery there are machines, tools, stage hands, procedures, practices, schedules, accidents, repairs, and a thousand other things happening out of sight and most often out of hearing.

Backstage allows the front stage to happen. Workers stocking shelves allow the supermarket to function and to provide you with the goods and services that you need. Whole cities have their backstage of subterranean passages, power stations, sewage lines, tunnels, and cables, allowing you to live safely and comfortably.

I went to Milan recently, to teach two seminars at a guitar festival. I extended my visit by a couple of days so that I could spend some time exploring the magnificent city. One of my extra days fell on a Monday. All the museums were closed. Tourist sites were as if abandoned. I went here and there in the city center, often finding myself completely alone in a beautiful winding street with buildings from three centuries ago. On that lonely Monday, the buildings sweetly whispered their secret stories into my ears. I felt that I was backstage in Milan, exploring the city’s this-is-how-it-works rather than its spectacle. I can’t tell you how happy I was.

In the big cities that I love to visit there are alleyways between buildings with service entrances, garbage disposal, the feeling of mystery and secret, also of danger. This is the backstage of apartment houses, offices, restaurants, shops of all sorts. At night, the backstage is gloriously cinematic. The imagination flies . . . love trysts, drug deals, murders. And rats, although these are much too real. Let’s say that “night is the backstage of day.”

I visit my local farmer’s market twice a week. I like going early in the morning, around 8 AM. In winter it’s dark, and depending on my timing I get to watch the changing light as the sun slowly rises. Some of the stands haven’t finished setting up when I arrive. I see the men and women drag crates from their vans parked at the curb. I see their putting up strings of lights on the awnings above their stands. Boxes of ice with fresh fish, the fish not yet arrayed prettily on the stands. I’m often a stand’s first customer of the day. Twice a week I’m backstage, witnessing my friends’ work, marveling at their skill and discipline, grateful for their dedication and reliability.

Backstage is richly populated. Museum guards, baristas, gardeners, delivery men and women, technicians, receptionists, school crossing guards, cleaners. I’ve had some wonderful chats in São Paulo, Paris, Glasgow, and points in between. The museum guard at the Musée Guimet of Asian Arts whose face hinted at the Buddha, the waiter on a cigarette break outside a restaurant, the cheerful crossing guard who kept something of the child within him, the gardener at the Place des Vosges with the poise and balance of a Tai Chi master. Sometimes the backstage hand is a displaced immigrant struggling between hope and fear, and his smile is heartbreaking to see.

At parties, conferences, meetings, baptisms and weddings I tend to become antsy. Sooner or later I feel compelled to get out of the main venue and explore the surroundings by myself. And I often witness the most marvelous happenings and encounters, in which the interplay between intimacy and formality is different from what we see “in public.”

A piano has a backstage, as does a cello, a guitar, any piece of furniture. “Backstage machinery has backstage machinery.”

We don’t have to stretch the metaphor too far before we understand that each of us has his or her own backstage, the workshop of the mind, the lifts and ramps for delivery, our innermost cleaning closet.

And an actual stage has an actual backstage, believe it or not. Several years ago, my wife Alexis and I were treated to a private tour of the backstage area of the Paris Opera at Bastille. Clothes making, wig making, shoes of all types and sizes; everything crazy and incredible, which is what opera is about. Huge spaces like hangars, industrial machinery, if you’re afraid of heights stay home.

My work as a teacher and coach often takes place backstage. In 2019 I taught an in-depth seminar for the actors of the Comedia Nacional, the main theater in Uruguay’s capital Montevideo. Deep inside, hidden from passersby or prying eyes, we the pros worked together for three days, playing games and learning from one another. During that visit I actually “went to the theater” and watched my colleagues delight the public with their storytelling. And for me to have been part of their preparation backstage . . . wow. Unbelievable.

There’s something exciting and terrifying about the corridors behind the stage, the stairs, the dust, the muffled sounds of your own steps. Because sooner or later you’ll have to pass from the back to the front, and you’ll find yourself naked on stage, in front of an audience. Then you’ll know whether or not you did your backstage job of cleaning up, structuring, and fashioning your music for the benefit of the men and women who came to see you perform.

©2022, Pedro de Alcantara