On my way to the Chopin Freedom Festival in Warsaw last week, I sit down in the cab that is too early for me, heading for the Paris airport. A bit grumpy, I don't feel like talking to him, feeling already the palpable tensions invading me while he tells me to put the back belt on. At the same time, I also think that I would like to be this person sowing joy everywhere on his way, wielding kindness as others wield the sword... But the disappointment of myself has the effect of falling on him ! That morning, it is impossible to be all sweetness, it is much too early for me and I think of my evening concert. As for the driver, he doesn't give up.
Not cold in the eyes - or insensitive to the signals of my bulldog vibration -, he questions me : "what do you do in life ? why do you go to Poland ?" I mumble "pianist" with the fear that an avalanche of other questions will follow. But at this word, the stars sparkle in his eyes. A miracle happens. The entire cab transforms as the driver exclaims, "What luck ! What a privilege ! A musician in my car !" Then he goes on, a broad smile on his face, "Better to make music than war." He doesn't know that I am on my way to the festival of freedom, to bring the sound of music to the gates of the cannons. His last sentence has the effect of an electroshock.
Under his swarthy air, I ask him where he comes from. He answers me : "Lebanon". I understand then that he knows what war means. He tells me what the bombed buildings look like, where a simple musical instrument rescued here or there is enough for the survivors to continue the music, this famous music... He is cheerful while talking, light, and decides to introduce me to all the known musicians of Lebanon through the radio of his cab. Soon the car turns into a party of songs and melodies, one of those parties that we should live every day of our life ! From him to me, a meeting has taken place. I feel grateful and almost struggle to leave his cab, too quickly arrived at the gates of the airport.
So it wasn't calm that I needed that morning, like all those mornings when we think we need to hide to relax, to separate ourselves to find our peace, to "calm down" to live better... But of meaning, of joy, of life, of humanity, of sharing. Of hope. Or let's say it more simply: of love. This substance of which French spiritual writer Christiane Singer speaks and which makes us say : "I see you".
TENSION OR ATTENTION
In this time of Mars, god of war, highly symbolic of the current political tensions, I wonder about my own tensions. In me. The first reflex of the pianist that I am is to listen to what is being played.
A score is made of dissonant harmonies as well as perfect chords. Would life be at this rhythm ? Must we go through war to test our peace ?
By pronouncing a tension, I realize its homophone attention, and understand that it is perhaps only question of that when we feel appearing in us this state of tension. Attention is recognizing and caring for all life. It seems to escape us, this life, that we suddenly clench our teeth, of rage or despair...
The struggle from self to self is a losing battle.
A hypnotherapist, used to the battlefields and accompanying the victims of wars, told me about a session where, in his office, a soldier had declared to him : "in war, the enemy is always the other".
Yet, at every moment, it is impossible to see oneself. Except with the help of a mirror ! And even then... It is by seeing the Other, each Other, that we can, little by little, know and recognize ourselves. Thus to see oneself. For the Other does not exist, as the wise man says ! It is only the reflection of my glance, of my history, which wants to settle at this place. Only exists what I look at. Be it beautiful, ugly, joyful or violent, the look is the author, the creator. The object perceived tells us a facet of who we are. It is up to us to create the puzzle !
In a hypnosis session, a client believes that he has a problem with a part of himself : too rigid, too lazy, too smoky, too sad... but this part is only a problem for the other part which would like something else. In reality, the problem is neither one nor the other but the tension between the two, this resistance to the idea of inventing new harmonies according to our singular agreements.
In this, it is only a question of attention until, from our battlefields, we finally start to laugh !
MUSIC, PLEASE !
Music has always inspired the idea of peace. A universal peace. From the famous cellist Rostropovich playing on the Berlin Wall in 1989 to conductor Daniel Barenboim's Divan Orchestra mixing Palestinians and Israelis in the same orchestra ; from Beethoven's Ode an die Freude * to Bach's Jesus, bleibet meine Freude **, it seems that music is, better than anyone else, an ambassador for peace.
Yet it is also a theater of our violence as well as our passions and joys.
But if it invites us so much to peace, it is because it brings us further than what we thought of our horizon... that it exceeds our ego. It is then no longer a question of anger against our neighbor but that of a humanity against itself. So against oneself. Until the impossible escape: love! Unless you live at war all your life... Sometimes I feel that I don't know if I am resisting love or war. Then, music reminds me that to love is to love each note and that there are, on a piano keyboard, the opposites in black and white to create, together, the magic of a work.
THE THEATER OF OUR DISSONANCES
Mozart composed in 1785 one of the most famous quartets named The Dissonances, exploring far the audacity of harmonic frictions. Chopin wrote the Revolutionary and, even without epic titles, let us hear in almost every other piece of music the revolt as well as the grace of our history. This is what music teaches me: it would be vain to seek peace only in relaxation. For life is made up of inhalation and exhalation. The tension of the muscles precedes their relaxation.
Peace is not the absence of war.
Real peace is a reminder, a zero point from where we come and where we go, like the body between two muscular tensions. Conflict is only a tightrope stretched between two extremes where we believe we can no longer see each other...
"The essential is always threatened by the insignificant", said French poet René Char. Thus, the question is not the war but what led us to war and how we will know, at each moment, how to find - or find again - the way to peace, be it a new peace, enriched with wisdom.
Peace informs us about the degree of our violence between two truces. It tells us where our fears are, that is to say, our buried pains of past times.
Bach, Mozart, Chopin, have known disappointments, wounds, despairs... yet they composed with an ineffable faith, be it in beauty, in harmony or in perfection. In the human soul.
Bach, Mozart, Chopin, have known disappointments, wounds, despairs... yet they composed with an ineffable faith, be it in beauty, in harmony or in perfection. In the human soul.
As in school where we learn first the art of problems before the art of solutions, I say to myself that we should know how to make peace before venturing into war ! In us, we have the code for both. But are we more used to the first or the second ? Unconsciously, how many of us think we are virtuosos of the problems and how many are convinced that we are good at the solutions ?
The paradox is that moment when we believe in our despair when in reality it is our faith that is called for. This is the art of the alchemist, of the artist or the magician. Suffering is waiting for an ideal context in order to be at peace, instead of being at peace with the knowledge that we are making an ideal out of what we choose.
Isn't the most beautiful of all bets the one to live with an open heart in this insane, crazy and above all dazzling life ?
VENUS AND MARS
Between me and this cab driver took place the oldest music: that of the heart. Beyond the speeches, far from the analyses... This is, for me, the true human progress, humble and infinite in front of the one that we would like to believe with machines taking us again in wars of territories, invasions, profits or powers. It seems that our century mixes and intermingles hyper-sensitivity with over-performance.
Deep down, I believe - no, I am sure ! - that at every crossroads there is a driver like this one, a melody like Mozart's, and that all we have to do is to listen to our soul, to access our true progress: that of our completeness, our wholeness. Our paradox of love.
In the sky, these days, the planets Mars (of war) and Venus (of love) are meeting. Will they get married ?
My thoughts go to Ukraine as much as to Russia when I relate to these men and women who do not know each other but are summoned to war while, as French writer Paul Valery said so terribly, their leaders know each other and speak politely around a table.
In us, it is allowed to believe everything and thus to create everything.
From my heart to yours,
Hélène Tysman
* Ode to Joy
** Jesus, let my joy remain