The Inevitable Self-Portrait

Warning! I’m about to make an absolute and dogmatic statement:

Everything is a Self-Portrait.

Think of people you know: their clothes offer us a self-portrait revealing their tastes, their personalities, their histories and stories. Their homes, their jobs; their sets of friends; their voices, their smells: Everything is a Self-Portrait. Friend A would never, ever wear those clothes that fit Friend B so well. Friend C smells of garlic and cigarettes, friend D of toothpaste and oh-I-hate-garlic-so-much. Toothpaste is a Self-Portrait, Therefore Everything is a Self-Portrait.

Point taken!

With some training, you can see a work of art for the first time and know, know, know exactly who created it: Rembrandt, Picasso, Matisse, O’Keefe; the painting’s subject is immaterial; Picasso’s work doesn’t look like O’Keefe’s, and vice versa; Picasso’s famous drawing of Igor Stravinsky could be called “Picasso’s Self-Portrait, in the guise of Stravinsky.”

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My recent birthday coincided with a session of my Drawing Lab. I thought I’d have fun at my own expense—probably the best way to celebrate any one thing, and particularly one’s own birthday. I told my students that they’d draw nothing but portraits of me, me, ME! I’d do quick poses (for quick don’t-think-drawings), slow poses, poses wearing strange garments. And we’d also copy or transform or maim photos of me as a child, as an adolescent, as a young man holding a Siamese cat. Plus, we’d take works of art by canonical artists and use them as a “background canvas” on which we’d draw my portrait.

Yes, you guessed it right: my students inevitably drew their own self-portraits. And you also guessed right: their drawings all capture some dimension of me, some detail or some echo of some essence, some je-ne-sais-quoi (which is French for “you don’t quite look like Gregory Peck or Paul Newman, did you know that, Pedro? Didn’t you know that plastic surgery wasn’t going to help you, far from it? You took out a BANK LOAN from a SHARK???? And THOSE are the RESULTS of the SURGERY??????”).

Two of my students are brother and sister—I mean, not little kids but grown-ups, so-called! They compete; say no more! I’ll call them “B” and “K.” And I myself am called “P.” On my birthday Drawing Lab I too drew self-portraits (which were self-portraits, inevitably). I’ll ask my wife if I’m a grown-up, and one day I’ll spin her answer into a blog post or lullaby. Or dirge, depending on what she says.

Here’s my adolescent self. From left to right, the original (“O”), then K, B, and P.

Here’s my portrait as inspired by a Matisse drawing.

Forty years ago, holding my late mother’s late cat.

The German artist Georg Baselitz is famous for painting and drawing upside-down portraits. I offered my students an upside-down photo of my sweet self as a canvas.

To a portrait by Rembrandt I layered an image of myself kinda dressed like an old lady wearing a shawl.

Another student is called “M.”Guess who she drew on my birthday! The slide show includes a couple of clues. You’ll know exactly who she drew.

What can you learn from these birthday hallucinations?

1. Don’t take yourself too seriously.

2. People look at you, and without realizing it they create, in their minds, their own self-portrait “as you.”

3. You do the same thing, all the time! Your thoughts, images, memories, and opinions are all self-portraits in a vast Subjective Museum With a Musty Basement Prone to Frequent Flooding.

4. Highly developed art skills won’t save you from drawing inevitable self-portraits. “Remember Rembrandt.”

5. Gregory Peck probably didn’t take himself too seriously.

6. You don’t look like Gregory Peck.

7. Neither did Paul Newman.

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

Turning Point

Certain themes have interested me for decades. I consider these themes archetypal: representative of profound existential dimensions that we might call eternal and universal.

Two of them have been pushing and pulling at each other.

The first is the subway, and more specifically the New York subway system. I started riding it in 1977, when I arrived in town as a scaredy-cat 19-year-old foreign student. I lived on-campus in Westchester, north of New York City proper, but I came into the city every week. I took a train from White Plains to Grand Central Station, then the shuttle to Times Square, then the C uptown to West 87th street where I took my cello lessons.

The subway was a dangerous place, difficult to navigate, unreliable, hostile. Incomprehensible announcements, a local suddenly becoming express without your realizing it, pushing a cello case through a turnstile that looked like a gigantic meat slicer . . . It was an underworld representing descent, getting lost, facing the risk of death, and also “traveling somewhere important.” It was incredible to enter it, and incredible to exit it.

I was too young to grasp the archetypal dimensions of the experience, but the sensations and emotions left a deep imprint. Every year, and multiple times a year, I have unsettling dreams about the subway: mysterious interchanges, wrong platforms, unfamiliar maps, no money to buy tokens and fares, depots where they shouldn’t be and where I myself shouldn’t be, everything taking place late at night.

The New York subway system today isn’t what it was in 1977. It has become less dangerous and less mysterious, but no less wonderful. The archetypal dimensions remain: stairways, entrances and exits, tunnels, tracks, announcements, train cars packed with strangers forced into intimacy, all accompanied by a rich soundscape mixing machinery and humanery, to coin a term.

I wrote a time-travel novel for young readers where the New York subway system is the vessel of time travel. Titled Backtracked, it was published by Delacorte Press in 2009. Researching it, I traveled far and wide within the system, making endless discoveries. Lines I had never taken in the past, gritty little stations in the middle of nowhere, elevated tracks going to the far reaches of northern Manhattan, mosaics as beautiful and as elaborate as those in Ravenna, buskers, “New York characters” (“certified nutcases”), an endless teeming festival of bodies and souls. I’m not the first person to fall in love with the subway, and I won’t be the last either.

The second theme, seemingly unrelated to the first, is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. You may be familiar with the story: Orpheus, a musician, marries his muse Eurydice. On the afternoon of their wedding she dies. Heartbroken, Orpheus sets out to the underworld, where he’ll attempt to retrieve Eurydice and bring her back “to this world of ours.” He’ll have to cross the river Styx, charm the guardians of the underworld, and earn Eurydice’s freedom with his music-making. The king of the underworld, touched by Orpheus’s music and his devotion to his wife and muse, allows him to retrieve Eurydice . . . under one condition.

The story doesn’t have a happy end.

For musicians, the myth of Orpheus is intriguing because it hints at the transformative and shamanic potential of music. Through his singing and playing, Orpheus could tame ferocious beasts and make stones cry. Perhaps belatedly, Orpheus comes to see Eurydice as his source of inspiration, his connection with the creative source (which is his own feminine dimension). When Eurydice dies, Orpheus himself is in mortal danger, hence his desperate quest.

I composed a 65-minute song cycle inspired by the myth, scoring it for pizzicato cello in scordatura, piano, voice, and whistling. I performed all parts myself, in a sort of shamanic one-man show where I’m Orpheus telling the world about my archetypal journey and its tragic end. The cycle is titled “Don’t Look Back.”

I pursued the Orpheus theme with another project in a different medium. In 2017 I found myself taking snapshots within the Paris metro system, which I ride frequently. The Paris metro is tidier and better behaved than the New York subway, but it shares the archetypal characteristics of its New York cousin. Over a few months, I took thousands of snapshots and shared some of them on social media. Gradually, it dawned upon me that my images could be read as a mysterious wordless narrative: Orpheus looking for Eurydice in an immense labyrinth of interconnected tracks, tunnels, stairs, corridors, signs and omens, the whole labyrinth peopled by a vast nameless population. You ride the metro or the subway with a different heart when you imagine you’re incessantly looking for your lost love. Retroactively, I titled the project “She was Here.” I don’t know yet what, if anything, I’ll do with these images, but a possibility is to write a novel or a cycle of poems in Spanish, a language I’ve been exploring rather fruitfully in recent years, and illustrate the text with the photos.

These projects—my New York subway novel Backtracked, my song cycle “Don’t Look Back,” and my photo narrative “She was Here”—have become intertwined and given birth to a novel inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set inside the New York subway system and titled Turning Point. Gabriel, a singer-songwriter living in Brooklyn, marries his muse Noï. During their intimate wedding party she disappears, and Gabriel intuits that she’s dead and not dead, having gone or been taken to the underworld of the New York subway system. He sets out to find her and to bring her back. I drafted the novel during the COVID confinement of November, 2020, that mysterious and marvelous time during which we introverts got a lot of things done.

And here it is today. I’ll publish Turning Point in 12 monthly installments, illustrated with some of my abstract drawings in ink and gouache and also with songs for voice, guitar, and whistle, alone and in combination—songs composed “as if” by the novel’s narrator and protagonist.

I chose to publish it through a Patreon page. Patreon is a sort of subscription system for creatives and their readers, listeners, and collectors. The creatives share their work, and the appreciative readers and listeners make monthly contributions. The system allows for different types of involvement, from informal to intense, from inexpensive to substantial. By subscribing to my Patreon page you can enjoy my writings (including Turning Point), my audio and video clips, my online courses (including The 5-Minute Voice series of 52 video clips), and my talks and masterclasses. And you might want to start collecting my artwork as well. All of this is nicely organized through Patreon.

You can go directly to my Patreon page and figure it out for yourself. Or you can visit this dedicated page here on my website, where I explain how it works.

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

The Mystery

1. Mystery is just another name for superstition. I don’t understand how you, such an intelligent human being, can’t see that.

2. I wake up to Mystery and I spend my day in Mystery and I fall asleep to Mystery. Mystery is Beauty and Meaning.

3. Wait, aren’t you even going to try to define Mystery?

4. I fear Mystery. I can’t explain it.

5. It’s a well-known fact that there are four types of Mystery: existential, psychological, situational, and biological.

6. In Septuagint the word Mystery meant “secret counsel of God.” In Vulgate it was translated as sacramentum.

7. Oh yeah, I love a good Mystery. I’m always dying to find out who killed the stupid idiot.

8. I don’t understand the first thing about mathematics. It’s a Mystery.

9. Mystery is First and Last, Alpha and Omega, Yin and Yang, Heaven and Earth.

10. Take the Mystery out of it, and all the fun is gone.

11. Mystery gives, and Mystery takes away. We don’t know why, and we can’t know why.

12. There’s mystery, and then there’s Mystery. Don’t confuse the two.

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

Completely Crazy!

You read a book, for instance, assigned to you as schoolwork or as part of your Book Club. And inevitably you become the book’s co-author. You understand some bits but not others, you pay attention to some characters and events but you let your brain rush through borings passages, you identify with a secondary hero and you want to strangle one of her enemies. You analyze and digest the book, which becomes yours. Strangely and amazingly, the book that you’ve just read is completely different from the same book that your Book Club friends or schoolmates read. You can hardly believe it. How could they have missed so much of it? How could anyone not hate the ending? Are your friends completely crazy?

No, they simply co-write the book, “their book,” in their own way.

This process, which I’m going to call Transformative Projecting Subjectivity, is central to life. We co-write books and films by the way we respond to them. We interpret events. We respond to people, who become screens on which we project our own stories and likes and dislikes; and our projected stories “are” the people that we meet and interact with. We see the world with our own eyes, our little eyes, our big eyes, our irritable or distracted or keen or childlike or cynical eyes. And most of the time we aren’t alert to how we’re subjectively creating our individual world. We don’t know it, but we’re completely crazy.

Let’s go back to the imaginary book of our example. It exists as a material object, as a Manifestation of the Book Principle that unites every book written in history. It exists as part of a chain of imagination, creative effort, revision, editing, publishing, and distributing. It comes in multiple editions—paperback, hardcover, Kindle, audio, smoke signals. It might be translated into several languages. And it means something subjectively different to every reader who’s ever leafed through it, or studied it in depth; it also means something to the readers who have a faint inkling of what the book is about but who resolutely refuse to read it. The book is charged with every readerly emotion; the book is the recipient of every reader’s own story. The book is a shapeshifter, incessantly transformed by its encounter with each reader. Some books have had a long life, taking part in billions of encounters, which are billions of transformations and interpretations.

I asked Google to translate something into Persian for me: “I, book, am billions.” I’ll credit Rumi with the sentiment, although this is of course a lie. Rumi and Google have never met.

Books are just an example. We are the interpretive co-authors of all objects, all events, all situations, all words, all statements; through our perceptions and projections we’re co-creators of “everything, and everything else too.” Necessarily, we are the co-authors and co-creators of the people we meet; and other people, meeting us, create infinitely varied versions of us.

Human beings are complex and multilayered. The last simple human being was an amoeba who lived in Inner Gondwana five hundred million years ago. Since then, complexity has taken over. Contradiction, paradox, conflicting impulses and appetites; personalities that change from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde at the drop of a pacifier; strengths and weaknesses indistinguishable from each other . . . we’re Veritable Dagwood Sandwiches, splattering the world with our ketchup

 From my favorite site, www.etymonline.com:

In some of the earliest uses it’s described as an East Indian sauce made with fruits and spices, with spelling catchup. If this stated origin is correct, it might be from Tulu kajipu, meaning "curry" and said to derive from kaje, "to chew." Yet the word, usually spelled ketchup, is also described in early use as something resembling anchovies or soy sauce. It is said in modern sources to be from Malay (Austronesian) kichap, a fish sauce, possibly from Chinese koechiap "brine of fish," which, if correct, perhaps is from the Chinese community in northern Vietnam [Terrien de Lacouperie, in "Babylonian and Oriental Record," 1889, 1890].

But I digress. I’m trying to say that every person who’s ever met you has fabricated a version of you. It doesn’t matter if the “other” has met you in passing or closely, professionally or personally, at home or at school, in the back of a poorly lit, drafty, moldy church or in the lobby of a shopping mall in Inner Gondwana. The “other” has partly perceived and partly invented you, and you’ve done the same to the “other.” You might struggle to recognize this fabricated impression as “you,” but, but, BUT! yes, it’s “you” in some difficult-to-explain way. Someone finds you clever and attractive, and someone else finds you tiresome and ketchup-y. They’re both right!!!!! They’re your co-authors, writing and interpreting you; and for them, you definitely are this entity that they see, hear, smell, touch, and sometimes taste.

It seems useful, I’d say, to accept that you’re complex and multilayered, and that other people are also complex and multilayered, and that human interactions are Subjective Dialogues of Complexities with Elements of Perception, Fact, Projection, Imagination, Filter, Perspective, and Taste All Mixed Up. Try to convince the “other” that You’re Not What They Think You Are, and the “other” will then know for sure that you really are COMPLETELY CRAZY.

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

Don't duck your responsibilities

And then we quacked. And the quacking was good.

Recently I led one of my Musician@Work weekend sessions in Paris. Five participants, three of them professionally trained musicians, two very experienced amateurs, everyone talented, intelligent, alert, and friendly. And everyone human: full of contradictions and paradoxes, with the potential of becoming pretzels of twisty emotions.

On the surface, the work session was about making music. In reality, it was about being human, and about sharing our contradictions and paradoxes in the form of sounds made and sounds heard. You know: un-pretzeling ourselves, solving our contradictions and embracing our paradoxes.

Let’s use that old and useful tool, the four-element list. Today’s choice of words:

Conception, Perception, Intention, Action.

The act or action of making music, playing an instrument, singing, studying a score, performing in front of a friend or in front of a crowd of strangers seems to be the most important thing. It’s immediate and real; it’s happening right now; I’m playing, singing, talking, writing, I’m doing something; I act, therefore I am.

But the action is only a sort of outward manifestation, subject to forces and impulses that hide deeply behind the action itself.

Our minds carry dozens, hundreds, and thousands of concepts. We have our own definitions of what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, what is central and what is peripheral. Our manners, for instance: for some people it’s right and good to air-kiss the cheeks of friends, for other people it’s taboo, ugly, perverted, and criminal: it’s sexual harassment, and you know it! The air-kiss is a relatively banal example. Conception shapes our aesthetics, our careers, our family life, our lives. If you want to change your actions, you have no choice but to go dig into the conceptions that animate your actions.

Look at something for two seconds; look at it for two minutes; look at it for ten minutes: your perception of this one thing will change. Look at something when you’re hungry, look at it in the dark, look at it when your son is throwing a tantrum. Again, that one thing will be highly variable in your perception. Two people are standing next to each other, watching the sunset. They see two different suns, two different skies, two different marvels. Perception, in other words, is subjective and flexible. You might be sure, sure, SURE that your best friend has blue eyes, until one day you realize that her eyes are green. Years, decades, and you hadn’t actually seen her eyes.

Conception determines a lot about your perceptions. Conception is a database of right and wrong, good and bad, should and shouldn’t, believe and disbelieve. It means that you can hate or dismiss something even before you see or hear it. Conception might make you blind and deaf.

You play something for your friends, let’s say half a page of a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach. What is your intention? The possibilities are endless. To share, to give, to impose; to be liked by the friend, or to annoy the friend; to honor Bach (the deity of structure and knowledge) or to play with Bach (the deity of invention and pleasure); to make yourself seen and heard, or to disappear into the music itself; to bitterly obey a long-dead parent who insisted that you play when you didn’t want to, or to joyfully disobey the long-dead parent who really wanted you to be a doctor or engineer, not a barefoot musician without a retirement plan; to play beautifully or to play skillfully; to be good, to be better, to be best . . . there are so many possible intentions. And these intentions, in collaboration with your conceptions and perceptions, definitely and absolutely and visibly and audibly shape your actions.

That’s why we quacked.

Early in the workshop we tried to do a little exercise in which our conceptions, perceptions, and intentions conspired against us. It was simple: sing a drone; sustain, as a group, a single unchanging pitch. We were too serious, too tentative, too judgmental, too awkward, too concerned, too invested in doing something elevated, something good, something good! But us humans, with our wonderful contradictions and paradoxes, we can also decide to suddenly change our intentions and conceptions.

We carry, by birth, a feral dimension, spontaneous and free from judgment, a lively energy plentifully demonstrated by babies and children and screaming toddlers, by sports fanatics at a bar watching a match on a big TV screen, by clowns with no fear of ridicule. Simplifying it, we’re able to behave “primordially.” In Paris, after we caught ourselves being timid and critical of ourselves, we decided to become fowl and foul, and we performed, collectively and for our pleasure and delight, a sonata of quacks, a sextet of cock-a-doodles, a symphony of silliness. Our intention to be admirable good boys and girls was overwhelmed by the crescendo poco a poco sempre of screeches, squeaks, clucks, and cha-caws. Then we did a decrescendo poco a poco sempre of these bestial impulses, and we settled into a sweet and sonorous drone, and we took turns singing beautiful melismatic improvisations in tune with the drone. We had arrived at a new conception of good and bad, together with new perceptions and intentions. And we acted as never before.

The quacks had birthed Kyrie Eleison, and the rest of the weekend in Paris was divine.

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

The menagerie

I live near the Place des Vosges in central Paris. I’ve visited it more than three thousand times over the decades. It’s a big part of my daily life, my creative life, my married life, my life. History, architecture, nature, literature; birds, trees, branches, leaves, flowers, grass; fountains, water, weather, sky, rain, snow. And humans, many! Adults and children, visitors, groups of tourists, joggers; park workers, gardeners, cleaners; musicians, sometimes just practicing and occasionally busking. It’s a whole world.

We zoom in and we see a small child, maybe three years old, entering the park and rushing toward one of the four fountains, an adult rushing behind to make sure the child doesn’t drown. And we zoom in further, and we see the child’s face looking at the water spouting from the mouths of stone lions: sixteen lions arrayed symmetrically around a circle. In the child’s face, sheer wonderment, sheer delight.

The park is magic. The fountain is magic. The stone lion is magic. Water is magic. Everything is alive, beautiful, strange, sometimes threatening, often funny, and always meaningful. Children are unstoppably attracted to the fountain. But also to leaves on the ground, blades of grass, pigeons, sticks, pebbles, grains of sand.

Children are fantastically good at exploring and discovering, and also at playing, and also at teaching themselves how to play, how to dig holes, how to transport buckets of water from the fountain to the sandbox, how to walk and run, how to play ball, how to talk to other children be they friends or foes, how to get attention from their parents, how to evade their parents’ unwanted attention.

Warning! Here comes what appears to be a change in subject!

At home my wife and I keep a whole menagerie of stuffed toys. Molly the duck in a dress; Max the tiger; Maya the lioness; Nadia the cub, Enescu the baby elephant. Some people have children, others have pets; my wife and I limit ourselves to stuffed toys. Don’t you understand? They’re alive! They’re beautiful! They’re funny and meaningful! We tell ourselves stories triggered by Molly or Enescu (named after a great musician who’s a source of inspiration to me) or Nadia (Boulanger, or course). I received Molly as a gift when I taught a workshop in London several years ago. I was traveling with just a backpack, and after the workshop I headed straight to the Eurostar station. My backpack was too full to accommodate Molly, so I placed her inside my coat, her head sticking out and pushing gently against my throat and jaw, caressing me and helping me orient myself in space. Molly, a gift from Claire and Kamal; Molly, a memory from London; Molly, a traveling companion; Molly, a delightful embodiment of magic and wonderment; Molly, teaching me not to worry about what people will think when they see me wearing her in public, so to speak, as an adornment of my adult self.

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Max the tiger is kinda floppy. He likes it when I grab him by the neck and get him to shake his head as if to drums that only he and I can hear. Maya the lioness is (1) extremely cute, (2) very expressive, and (3) soft and cuddly and fluffy and soft and cuddly. To touch her, to squeeze her, to press her against your face is to enhance your perception of the physical world, the world of sensations and gradations, of textures, forms and shapes, volumes, weight or the lack of weight. Squeezing a stuffed lion makes you sensitive and smart. And it makes you wanna cry a little from time to time.

By the fountain, I interviewed an imaginary child, a spokesperson for all children: “The lion is my friend. He talks to me. He’s called Leo Stinkybreath.” This is the child’s existence, and to lose touch with your own inner child is a loss with tragic consequences. All adults should have one or three or twelve stuffed toys in their homes and offices. Your birthday is coming up? Stuffed toy. You received a new book contract? Stuffed toy, celebration. Christmas? Stuffed toy. Lonely rainy Friday? Stuffed toy, tenderness, healing. You have no reason to go get a stuffed toy? That’s the very reason why you should go get one.

 ©2024, Pedro de Alcantara