Month: September 2019

The Snake

Most people believed it was a legend because the climate was not a favourable one for snakes. Grass snakes had been reported, but no more. Fact is, there was a big, beautiful, black snake down the hill. It dwelled under the stone by the birch tree, about halfway on our way to the local supermarket. Its body was as thick as a human leg and long enough to bridge both sides of the river. Its eyes were always wide open; the pupil a black diamond amidst a pool of white gold. Stories went that the snake had appeared after a giant eruption of the old volcano. At first an infinitesimal living residue left by an outburst of magmatic energy, it had remained secluded under a stone, they said. It grew at the infinitely slow pace of sedimentation, the weight of time accumulating onto its body, leaving traces of scales behind. Others said that a collusion between the earth and an asteroid had projected it onto the valley, adorning it with that uncanny metallic scent and auras of unknowings.

The first time I saw it—it was that afternoon when Mom had sent me to go get some eggs for dinner—the snake hissed like an old locomotive approaching the highway. Its hooked tongue pointed in my direction, swift as lightning, unpredictably sharp. I stopped, freezing, trying to resemble the stone in the grass. I fixed on the horizon, concentrated on my upper lip, fearing to feel the air dripping off my nose, scared to release a sound, to betray the beginning of a motion. And yet I sensed the surrounding becoming sheer movement, like a waterfall submerging the stone that I had become, testing me, covering me up with the fluidity of time passing, with the beating noise of my blood against my chest, moving up my face, knocking at my temples, fleeing down my spine, numbing my limbs.

I heard it sigh—at least I thought I did—and I watched it crawl, meandering in the dust, folding and unfolding like a thick rubber rope twisting under pressure. It came to face me, daring, yet keeping its distance, and we both stood there. I lost track of all familiar references; my thoughts disappeared into its black dress. When I roused myself, the snake had coiled back under the stone, the rhythm of its lungs barely visible under its spine cage.

I went to the supermarket to get those eggs and came back home with the sight of the snake fixed in my memory, like those tiny green beads of goosegrass always sticking on my socks. The next morning, I saw myself returning down the hill. No sound of a hissing locomotive this time. But as I peeked at the interstice between the rock and the earth, there where shadows grow, I saw the round edge of its body, pitch-dark, immobile. And instead of feeling my blood turn warm and cold at the same time, this time, I felt the urge to pet it, just like I would pet a cat jumping on my lap. It’s not that the fear was gone, no, but the fear I now experienced no longer seemed to originate in the sight of the reptile, but rather in the recognition of its existence in my own world. Somehow, the mere sight of it gave me a feeling of homecoming. It was like we shared a deep-seated similarity; like it had preceded me; like I could have not been here without it lying under its stone in the field down the hill nearby the birch tree.

Weeks, months, years passed. It became a habit to go down the hill and check on the snake’s dwelling, peeking under the stone, holding my breath and yet feeling this urge to see its body curl out of its hole, to gaze at the black diamond in its eyes, to imagine holding its head in my hands and whispering in its ears. Most of the times, the snake would lie like a massive leathery rope collapsed upon itself, its head buried in-between two lumps. When it was awake, we would stand there, face to face, daring each other. It happened that it reached me with its hooked tong, jerking me out of my admirative state. But I soon discovered that keeping my gaze straight into its eyes would make it coil back under its stone, its wilderness shrinking like ice in warm water.

It was on one of those mornings that I started to notice the change. The scales around its neck had lost their metallic quality, now lying soft like down with hints of coniferous patterns, like feathers. I went back home, made tea, drunk water instead, started to make breakfast but I was not hungry. I sat there, confused and mesmerized, listening to the wind passing by the window, waiting.

It was twilight when the sound of its whinnying made the entire valley quiver and I saw it rise: a giant black, winged horse, reaching for the stars.

Amsterdam, Spring 2019

Playing music: a method for working and living

Photo by Tadas Mikuckis on Unsplash

I remember the time just before my first piano lesson. I was nine. My father is cellist, and he was playing sonatas with a wonderful pianist. A young woman, short hair, soft hands, eyes that were full of life. She rode a motorcycle. I found her one of the most fascinating women around. I loved her to be around, but I also felt very shy to address her personally.

I had decided for a long time already that I wanted to play the piano, and it was without a question that she would become my instructor. When the school year would begin, I would start with private lessons. During the summer, I would join the two-weeks chamber music retreat that my father organized for children, in the middle of the mountain area where we were living. I still see her approaching me one late afternoon, after their sonata rehearsals. I don’t remember what she said exactly, but I remember it was about me and her becoming pupil and teacher of one another. And I remember becoming very shy, to the point that I might have given her the impression that I was not really into this.

I was. I had been for years already. And it was just the beginning.

Since then, playing the piano has become one of my most precious moments in life. Almost everything else has changed in the twenty-six years that separate today from that summer. But playing the piano has remained. And as the years passed by, I started to realize that playing an instrument yield many a lesson for doing our jobs and for being humans.

Before anything else, playing an instrument requires concentration. In that concentration, technique finds precision to the extent that it can almost be forgotten. But as soon as the concentration breaks, technical weaknesses take over to the detriment of the play. Playing an instrument thus means training one’s ability to concentrate, which has served me many a times. It has served me when teaching, when reading, when writing, when brainstorming. The faculty to concentrate is a gift: it is one of the best tools we have to make space where we first see only chaos. In that space, meaning can emerge.

Autonomous Artists Anonymous

Playing an instrument also goes hand in hand with an intense training in listening. And that goes deeper than it seems. On the surface, we listen to the notes that we play: the melody they form, the harmony they carry, the rhythm that propels them forward, or that let them linger. To hear all of this properly already requires training and perseverance. And suddenly we start to hear more: we start to hear the details in-between: the silences without which the music would not sound; the interstice between the notes, forming in themselves melodies, harmonies, and rhythms. We start to hear the pulse of the piece, precise and steady as the heart of a living creature. In that listening, we enter the realm of music in all its magnitude, leaving behind the daily chores, our worries, and our ambitions. Listening makes us live the moment in all its dimensions, and that is a skill that has enriched my life and the relationships within it. From family to friends to students and colleagues, I have noticed many a times how much listening helps when things need attention. Listening allows emotions to be there, but to be there at rest. Listening creates a space of consciousness in which we connect to better understand, leaving space for the unexpected.

Above all, playing an instrument comes with a practice of knowing that has nothing to do with words, books, or encyclopedia. The knowing that we do through music has to do with being present. From the very first note of the simplest technique exercise, making music comes with a kind of devotion and intensity that is kind of unique. The body takes over in a matter of concentration that not only makes it possible to play a possibly technically difficult piece, but that also makes it possible to use flows of energy and flows of emotions as if these were words, sentences, and stories.

Just as language, music is all about communication. When I play a piece, I always see a story unfolding. It can be a simple bedtime story, but most often, it is a whole journey. I traverse magic forests where I meet trolls and giants. I hear thunderstorms and raindrops merging with the glittering of the sun. I hear people dancing of joy, sadness, or anger. I sense fear, regret, and hope, their relation and their separation.

Most of all, I sense the depth of respiration in which multiple layers of life connect with one another. It starts with the very physical sensation of my own breathing, the air moving through my lungs and filling up my belly; it grounds me in its quiet rhythm of in and out; and it provides me with the necessary stability to perform the technical rhythms of my play. Somehow, becoming attuned to the physical rhythm of breathing also opens the door to sensing the rhythm of life: from the banal flow of people and things in my direct surrounding, to a much bigger and diffuser reality. Sometimes, it even seems as if I can begin to sense the loop of time at a scale that is much bigger than a human life, and maybe even bigger than humanity. Sometimes, the scale is no longer about human breath, but about the breath of magma, of stones, of mountains, of rivers, of oceans. In music, the scales of million and of the infinitesimal cohabit.  

Photo by Kimberleigh Aleksandra on Unsplash

And yet, playing music is one of the most sober experience I know. Without practice, no music. And practice has nothing to do with the grand sonata that we eventually want to play. Practice is about repeating a series of notes over and over again, in order to find the physical sensation that will allow to eventually play the notes with musicality. For an amateur like myself, we are not talking here about ten times. Not about fifty times. It’s about hundreds of times, sometimes even thousands. It’s incredible what it takes to find the right balance between tonicity and relaxation. Without tonicity, the music cannot take off. Notes won’t be precise, and the rhythm will disaggregate and wither away. Without relaxation, notes will sound hard and dry, and it won’t take long before muscles stiffen and slap your body with cramps.

In that practice of repetition lies a life lesson that I find both humbling and sobering. Humbling because music is infinitely bigger than what I will ever be able to express in words. Sobering, because with patience, practice and repetition, we can train our body to make music. One note after the other. If we find the discipline to repeat those notes, we can reach the beating heart of the grand sonata, and with it, feel, just for a moment, the whole cycle of life.

Photo by Kevin Li on Unsplash

Poem of the researcher

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Somewhat lost in the literature on affect, I decided to switch gear and try to grasp “affect” in free poetic writing. The idea was not to craft a high quality literary poem, but to allow a different register to guide me in the process of understanding affect. My departure point was to make affect the main character in the poem. The rest followed. Here it is.

~~~

Affect is the voice that dares bring the illogical into the frame; that dares make claims with no arguments.

Affect tells the story of the unsaid and is there to contain.

Affect is a space of silence ready—or unready—to open up.

Affect knows the body just as well as it knows the interspace between bodies.

Affect knows the guts; it knows blood pressure; it knows muscle tension, and the nervous system.

Affect knows the touch of a skin against another skin. It knows the release; it knows the abandon—both may be confused but affect knows the difference.

Affect knows when it knows, and affect lets go when it doesn’t.

Affect colours the voice.

Affect reads the ungraspable, and signals it knowing in return.

Affect transmutes.

Affect travels.

Affect repeats.

And affect transforms.

A Room of One’s Own

Photo by Diane Helentjaris on Unsplash

The best thing about receiving a prestigious scholarship such as the Marie Sklodowska-Curie is without doubt the vitality that comes from Virginia Woolf’s credo: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.”

A Room of One’s Own was often on my mind in the past years, when I was meditating about my urge to write more, and my urge to be financially independent. I had decided to work less to be able to write. But working less meant earning less, and I experienced how quickly creative energy recedes when the space to write has no official space to be. I published articles, I published a book, but somehow, the joy that comes with writing kept escaping me. I felt like a fish out of water, gasping for air, trying to swim in an environment where swimming had been turned into springing. I was a resilient fish, I kept springing, but my goodness what was I tired.  

Receiving this scholarship was the unexpected gift that enabled me to re-unite writing with work. There was my water. I felt like a whale finding its way back to the ocean, after having evaded the danger of the shore nearby. I’m sure those around me could spot jets of joy escaping as I rolled my senses in the comfort of my new habitat.

My own room is not a room set in stone. I’ve noticed that I work best when being in transit—I might be a real fish in the end—sitting at new places where nothing belongs to me, except for my writing gears: a laptop, a notepad and a pen. Libraries, cafeterias, coffee houses of all sorts. I do return to places I liked. Together, they form a network of power sockets feeding my creative energy. They connect the different cities I live in (Amsterdam, London, Paris), providing me with ephemeral anchors in the sea of images and ideas that inhabit my inner life. The lack of belongings makes me focus. I just sit, and let my senses submerge my thinking. My concentration arises, my tong starts moving (I always mumble when writing), my fingers tingle and press the keys. Images become words; words become images. In those moments, I feel intensely connected.

The room of my own may be especially my own by the fact that I’m not owning it. But the money makes more of a difference than I’d perhaps like to admit. I’ve always told myself that living the bohemian life had its benefit too. Knowing how to cook a delicious diner with just a couple of ingredients found in the house that evening. Try the pasta with slowly caramelized garlic and paprika, a couple of parmesan chips and some pepper. It’s comfort food in disguise. But the lack of financial independence was a constant reminder of those power relations through which women have been belittled, infantilized, and kept in the custody of financial dependency. I was earning the wage of an intern, working more than twice the number of hours for which I was being paid.

I remember a conversation with a friend who asked me what kept me from doing the things I dreamed of doing. I then realized that being paid like an intern makes you feel like an intern, regardless of education and experience. The lack of financial recognition made me feel numb. It cut my wings down.

Don’t get me wrong, being an intern can be wonderful. It can give you the space to discover and try things out. Acting like the empresario you always wanted to become. Drafting your first contract while you dream of becoming a legal expert. The thin paycheck that comes with it, can, when well timed, make you feel like you are flying because you never experienced earning your own money. I have experienced the joy of the intern, but that was 15 years ago. Life moved on. I settled, had a child, earned a PhD, published, organized conferences, taught for years, managed teams of lecturers, bearing the responsibility to fix whatever had to be fixed. So, instead of feeling my world expanding by means of sheer discovery, I now felt it shrinking behind the wall of shame that came with the reality of not seeming to be able to make a living out of my own skills.

Being financially safe—and to be safe, one must be independent—is a key to unlock spaces of creativity. When money is there, space can be created in whatever way suites. I feel the water around me, and my senses attune to the webs of connection I’m about to traverse. I do not know where this journey will end, but one thing I know for sure: the ocean has many stories to tell. I’m all ears, ready to catch them and offer them to you. Stay tuned.  

Photo by Ilse Orsel on Unsplash