Give me a C, give me a U... whatever
by Michel Heitzmann
© Michel Heitzmann - Tight for some of that day but not for Mbappé: 4 x 2
A friend called me today. Sharp as a cutter, he analysed what I have been writing and wanted to agree on a label.
Stoicism, he said. Or minimalism. Or slow living. Maybe meditation.
Labels are reference points and they’re also dangerous, as in foreigner. None of them.
Stoicism is endurance. Marcus Aurelius taking the blow and controlling the reaction. I am not teaching anyone to suffer the casino better. I am naming the casino. And I admit that normally I yell back when blown.
Minimalism is aesthetic monasticism. Capsule wardrobes and Apple stores and a single rock on a beige cover. There is a saucisson on my porch and a moquette bordeaux in a village council. Not minimal. Specific but yes, beautiful it must be!
Slow living is a brand. Linen, sourdough, a farmhouse in Provence shot through a soft filter. I am not selling pace. I am naming theft and love to drive fast and I can’t afford a place in Provence. And France is so complicated.
Meditation is the most respected of the wrong labels. It deserves more than a line. So I will give it three.
Senegal. Last May. On my back, on a beach, in a group. There was a method. Close your eyes. Follow the instructions. Breathe in this rhythm. You will reach a different state.
I closed my eyes for about twelve seconds. Then I went rebel.
I opened them.
The sky over Senegal at night is all the constellations a meter away. So many stars that the dark between them stops being the main thing. The oxygenation was doing something to me and the stars started moving. They became meteors. Every one of them. The whole sky in motion above me.
That night taught me three things.
The first is that disobeying orders has its benefits although I knew that.
The second is why I had to chase meteors with a camera a week ago, on a Vaud hillside with two dogs at 4am, lens up at the Lyrids.
The third is bigger. The method had told me to shut one sense down to find peace. I found something better by leaving them all on. The breath. The sand under my back. The sound of the ocean. The smell of the air. The sky moving above me. All of them at once as tears rolled down my cheeks. Not sadness as Mick Jagger would ballad us some decades ago with As Tears Go By. But out of fulfilment. It’s only rock’n’roll but i like it.
Symphony of senses.
© Michel Heitzmann - Captain America in Senegal
That is the state. Not meditation. Not silence. Not detox. The senses are what connect us to what is actually there. Why shut one off?
And memory joins the symphony. A scent reminds you of a place. A sound brings back a face. The senses do not work alone and they do not work only in the present. Memory is the add-on the gurus forget to mention.
The Amazon, some months later. Dawn in the jungle.
I went up a mirador before the first rays. It was not quiet at all but a cacophony of sounds going from the familiar to electric saws. All from insects.
Then the next layer turns on. Then the next. By the time the light arrives the volume is already at full. Some insects go quiet but the drums and cymbals come in. Water dripping somewhere off a leaf. Wind moving through three different heights of canopy at once. Heat starting on the skin before it reaches the air. A rustle that could be a snake, a monkey or wind. And the soprano of the birds.
There is no method available. There is no posture. There is no monk. Nor a bell. You either notice or you miss it.
The Amazon does not teach you a practice. It refuses to be ignored. It is a fairly scary place unless you are with someone who knows what not to touch or step. The only ecosystem on the planet that does not let anybody single-channel it.
Full symphony of senses required for pale face here.
© Michel Heitzmann - One of the rustles
This evening, Bassins. As I write. Dogs fed.
The nice birds (not the Russell Crowe ones doing Ragnarök duty in the garden all year round) came back some weeks ago and they have been multiplying. There are more of them every morning. They start before visible dawn and go non-stop for some fourteen hours. It is not a soundtrack. It is several conversations happening at once that do not need me as the third party.
This is not silence. Silence is absence. Silence is what people imagine when they say they want to get away from it all.
This is quietly beautiful. Which is a different word entirely.
The casino is loud. The forest is loud. They are not the same kind of loud. One is a hijack. The other is a philharmonic. The casino wants you to keep one channel open and starve the others. The philharmonic wants nothing from you. It just plays a symphony to be enjoyed.
The practice (and I have to stop calling it a practice in a minute) is recognising the difference.
My friend wanted a label. I have been resisting one. So let me tell you why.
There is no method.
I do nothing special. I am just aware.
A practice implies discipline. A protocol. Something you have to do. Sit on a cushion. Breathe in counts. Journal in the morning. Track your streaks. The whole wellness industry sells practices. Apps with notifications, programs with weeks, coaches with frameworks, retreats with menus, people with non-Western names often dressed in statements.
What I am describing is not that. It is the removal of everything that prevents the senses from doing their job. The senses come back online when you stop drowning them. There is nothing to learn. There is everything to stop doing.
The method was the noise.
This is also why the professor in Week 1 could not believe my essay. He had a method for what good writing looked like. I had no method. I just wrote. The village council in Week 2 had a method for governance. I had no method. I just paid attention to what was happening. The saucisson in Week 6 is the method. The casino in Week 7 is the method. Method is what they sell you. Awareness is what they take.
Now I can hear the next question coming. Because the moment you say there is no method, you are filed under a different shelf.
You know the shelf. Every bookstore has it. It sits between Self-Help and Cooking. The covers are all beige. Half of them have a single rock on them. The other half have a single feather. Several have a single Buddha but with the face slightly turned away as if even he is bored.
Apparently if you say there is no path, you are Zen. If you say be here now, you are Buddhist. If you sit very still and watch, you are a contemplative Christian. Or worse. If you do all three with a friend, you have started a cult.
Krishnamurti said there is no path to find truth. He then spent a life giving talks about the path of no path. I say truth is a perception to explore but then I am only an engineer.
Tony Parsons says there is no one to wake up. He then sells stadiums.
Je pense donc je suis et je t’emmerde.
Sartre was partially right. Hell is other people telling you who you are. And who you should be.
I am not picking on them. I am noting that the moment you say there is no method, you have started one. The book you write to explain there is no book becomes a book. This is the trap. The Quiet Frame will fall into it the moment I let it.
Which brings me to the part where I should be capitalising on all this.
Probably I should come up with a better name. Start a practice. Do the TED talk. Found a sect. Ask for money. Or just rob à la evangelist. Build a following. Write ten books that are the same book. Get on the beige shelf between the rock and the feather, perhaps with a mirror on the cover.
Full disclosure. The last time I opened Descartes or Sartre was at school. Immensely boring for a teenager. I much preferred Catcher in the Rye and Brave New World. Read forty-five years ago in French. English was not yet on the menu. Holden taught me what to refuse.
And inspired me to walk through Central Park later as a survival-Spanish-speaking student in New York, where the guy behind the counter from Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic kept asking me to choose between white, whole-wheat, sourdough, French, rye, marble rye, pumpernickel. I would point a finger and then he would do it again with the cold cuts. Pastrami, corned beef, capicola, bologna, liverwurst. And once more with the cheese, where Swiss meant something that had holes and tasted like plastic.
Neither of us knew what most of those were. I still do not know. And I do not care.
Huxley taught me what was being built. I never ventured into Krishnamurti or Parsons. I ran a search to write this up. The trick is well documented. Wikipedia is a generous host. Please do not query me at a party about any of this. Unless I have signal on my phone.
I am not making any money on this.
The other path is unethical, boring and idiotic. Pick two and I might consider it.
A friend asked me what to call it.
Nothing special. I am just aware.
If there must be a name (and apparently there must, because the brain wants a folder for everything) I have been typing it all this time. On the URL. In the apps. In the sign-off of every piece. In the journal he had been reading from when he wrote to me.
The Quiet Frame.
Not a doctrine. A stance.
A frame is a choice about what enters. Quiet is what is left when the noise stops competing for the centre. The Quiet Frame is what you do when you stop letting the casino, the salami, the professor, the village council, the screen, the algorithm, the method, the brand, the sect, the ten books, the rock and the feather all reach in at once.
It translates better than I expected. Le cadre tranquille. In French cadre also means executive. A quiet pun on forty years I spent inside companies that designed the slices. A moldura quieta. Painting, picture, scene, all at once.
It is small on purpose. Symphony of senses. Memory included.
Shut up. Listen. Touch. See. Smell. Taste.
We are alive. That is the whole thing.
And then.
I imagine the day when I see something. I take a photo because there is beauty even in ugly scenes or the unnoticed. I come home. I put it on the wall. Not to show off. To keep seeing it. To let it stay long enough to understand what it meant to me. Not buried in 32,149 photos some algorithm will order for me, and probably misorder, given it can’t know me as I don’t know myself.
On the wall.
Not in a futuristic Tom Cruise way. The old fashioned way. Earning the space on the wall to become the quiet frame, my quiet frame, that day.
There must be a simpler way to do this.
Am not monetising. Perhaps yet. The apps are free and they do one thing: clear the noise so you can hear yourself, hear others, hear the planet.
Go to thequietframe.com. Download. Write back.
I am also thankful to another friend who reached out looking for an article from a few weeks back. I also struggled to find it. Until I went to journal.thequietframe.com. It is all there.
Thanks for reading.