Since the start of the second millennium, my impression is that we've never questioned relationships so much. Duality, double or duel, this famous number 2 sometimes offers us peace, sometimes war. Clinging to each of our seconds, each of our breaths, it leaves us breathless when we no longer know where to turn for rest...
Logically, this millennium is also that of the "awake ones", those relentless seekers of "non-duality" in times when truth has never seemed so relative.
With each new lunation, this question comes back to me, like a boomerang, always different and sometimes insistent: how can I be "with"?
THE WORLD
I often feel this irrepressible urge to get out of the orchestra. As Woody Allen said, exclaiming: "Stop the earth! I want to get off", this sensation of an incessant merry-go-round, like a gigantic beast, frightens me. It's all the violence of the world, from its very origins, boiling up and coming out in fits and starts. The world irritates me, disgusts me, horrifies me. In these moments, it may well be a passing ant, a clumsy onlooker on a bus or a friend too slow as usual in all her actions. Everything in me cries out to be exiled as far away as it's possible to go!
Is this a paradox for a therapist who devotes body and soul to the person she accompanies for the duration of a session? On the contrary: it's a legitimate admission of her inability to be a saint. Empathy is not earned through good behavior. It is felt and deployed, just as a wild animal learns little by little by breathing in smells and sniffing out common sense. Nothing to do with being a good or a bad person.
On the other hand, the previous millennium, which seemed intent on exploring individualism to its limits, stopped short of empowerment and so-called independence. A beautiful, luxurious illusion. We may think we're free, but it's machine technology to which we've become attached. Believing we'd reached the end of what could prevent us from being at peace (the Other, the human), here we are again, facing ourselves. Like a traveller who has circumnavigated the globe, we find ourselves having circumnavigated ourselves... from the outside. But what about the inside?
In reality, we don't know how to be a soloist any more than we know how to be an orchestral musician. For the soloist still plays with an audience, with an acoustic, with the spirit of a place. And the orchestral musician will never be able to play without first tuning himself, close to his ear, imperturbable while the din of this quest for a common tuning fork, never definitive, continues.
"IT'S NOT THE NOTES BUT WHAT'S BETWEEN THEM THAT COUNTS". MOZART
Thierry Janssen, a former eminent surgeon who decided to leave the medical profession to create his school of La Posture Juste, had this extraordinary saying: "between you and me, the most important thing is neither you nor me, but the and".
This is the most demanding of all our adventures, the highest of all our Himalayas. For isn't this and what we've been trying to appease since the barbarism of ancient times and the violence of modern times?
So, when will we finally find the tuning fork for this great symphony? Or rather, by what means are we finally going to tune in?
The TV news or the print media have their tuning fork. Farmers and workers have another. Entrepreneurs, artists, educators or inventors, scientific researchers and spiritual seekers are still under other prisms. Then there are the Chinese, the Hindus, the First Peoples... In the end, the cacophony is merely the result of soloists who haven't taken the time to shake hands before playing, to say hello before tuning in. Some know no more about their instrument than when the teacher hands the child a recorder and tells him to blow into it. Others are virtuosos but have long since exiled themselves behind the scenes. Sometimes even the front of the stage is the safest place to hide...
It's a good thing the instruments have different timbres. It's a good thing that my opinions have a different color from those of my neighbor. Why else would life be constantly multiplying?
So, when will we finally learn that it's in nature to be "other" and included? That every blade of grass looks different, yet complements each other? Or will our unconscious continue to rail against what we don't know?
If you're a soloist because you hate the orchestra, chances are you'll hate everything else in your path: the audience, the theater team, the accompanist... and ultimately yourself! And if you decide to join an orchestra because you can't find the soloist in yourself, you're likely to experience frustration after frustration.
AT THE CONSERVATORY
When I was studying chamber music at the Paris Conservatoire, my teacher Pierre-Laurent Aimard would always ask us with his perfidious yet lucid air: "Do you want to be a trio of three soloists or three soloists who merge into a trio?" There was no judgment on one or the other. For how much we love to witness the encounters of an Ivry Gitlis with a Martha Argerich, who don't strike a note together like two bohemians blending their talents in an improvised dance. But how much are we also touched when a quartet seems to breathe like a single lung, even though this quartet is, logically, made up of great artists who leave for a moment to make room for something bigger...
Can we do it? Breathing together means trusting neither ourselves nor the other. For which of the two really exists? But in the "and". This is the holy spirit that heralds, perhaps, our third millennium...
Is this not the suggestion of our times? Explore all the positions of the 2, from hatred to love, by fusion or defusion, and let love finally embrace fear, as in those moments of flow with an audience or with other musicians when you no longer know whether you're playing or being played.
All this is full of paradoxes, I grant you. As soon as we name things, they run the risk of becoming fixed in a way that distorts them the next second. Life is like modeling clay. Every moment requires us to readjust it.
So there's no question of stepping aside out of false modesty or misplaced guilt. The artist coach in me is sufficiently alert to the greatness of each individual, to that "Self" which is just waiting to burst forth and express itself, to imagine denying the sovereignty of the individual.
And yet, if we have explored individual performance so much in the last millennium, as if technology were constantly catapulting us out of the living world, we never seem to go anywhere except face to face with ourselves.
The wise man who was asked how best to be with the Other replied: "there is no other!"
THE FATHER, THE SON... AND THE HOLY SPIRIT
So, before imagining this third millennium (if we're still here) - and perhaps we will be in a triangular relationship with Self, Other and Machine - we are perpetually faced with the question of relationship. Whether to a tree, the passing wind, my thoughts, myself, my neighbor or the Far East. In this world within us, the multiple of "I" is always being created. And the game begins!
There's what caresses and what irritates. What tickles and what itches. It's with all this that we weave a web like the spider, without knowing why. This is our greatest work of art!
I find myself as full of faith in Humanity as I am despairing of a doomed fate. "What kind of collective madness is this?" exclaims French actor Louis de Funès in Le Grand Restaurant! In reality, these are memories which, through my own instrument, come back to life according to the color of the sky, the stars, the full moon or the new one... With a burst of laughter, I go out into the street with my soul in love or the murderous desire to strangle my neighbor!
Then, one fine day, my own instrument will be completely in tune.
That's when you're as capable of playing as you are of listening, as capable of doing as you are of letting go. And the great symphony, Sergiu Celibidache style, advances to its climax without denying anything. Without imposing anything either. Everything is embraced, like the feeling of a child whose mother's arms embrace it so tightly that it forgets the sad cloud of a day, the boo-boo of a moment. In reality, it's not forgotten, it's embraced.
The great weaving continues and, like delicate fingers handling the needle with care and precision, we untie the knots to weave again.
Life is perpetual multiplication. Like the organisms it contains, cells give rise to other cells and so on... We are like an octopus with infinite tentacles. It's up to us to become its virtuoso, that is, to inhabit its center, so much so that, conscious of being That, in this instant, we see - and love - the great expanding polyphony.
In reality, we're not with the world, we're in it. And it in us.
So be it.
Wishing you a wonderful Easter!
In the inspiration of your heart
And the beauty of your soul,
Hélène Tysman
