PARIS NOTES #6: Playing Chess with Yourself: empathy training

Posted on November 6, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

The good thing about playing chess with yourself is the two sides are evenly matched. The bad thing is you know what the other side is thinking. It becomes an ultimate game of one-upmanship, to outthink the person who is outthinking you as you outthink them. This can go on like mirrors opposite each other where images go into infinity.

It also means you cannot ambush the other side, there are no calculated surprise attacks, and that winning is, more than usual, the result of making few, essentially no, mistakes.

It also means that every time you win, you lose; and every time you lose, you win. This is superior empathy training.

Nonetheless you do – or I do – sometimes choose sides. When black mauled white a couple games back, I found the game distasteful. A bully was on the move and not about to stop until all royalty of its so-called enemy were dead on the field. There was no finesse, only slaughter. It took me a couple days to return to the board.

And I couldn’t help but rejoice when black was clearly winning an earlier game. Check. Check. Check. Check. But when black couldn’t achieve checkmate, he confidently used a turn not to check again but to bring another piece in for the kill. In the space of one free move, the white queen zoomed the length of the board, put the black king in check, and sealed the deal on the next move with the aid of a lone white knight. For 15 minutes black had controlled everything. In 15 seconds white won the game. I knew from the beginning that the white queen was intrepid, and I liked that.

My maternal grandfather played chess 80 years ago by mail with people he didn’t know. My paternal grandfather was the checker champion of Cerro Gordo county, Iowa. It runs in the family. Conniving, pouncing, strategizing, foiling. I own up. It has nothing to do with building peace or inclusive dialogue. It’s not a win-win, but I feel the tickles in my brain, and adversaries who demand respect from each other thrill me.

And I like that the queen is so powerful while the king can hardly move and tends to cower.

I also like when an overlooked pawn steps forth to upend an entire game. “I can take you, queen.” “I can checkmate you, king.” “You didn’t see me coming, did you? Well, here I am.”

I’m not actually that good, and I play only when I’m in Paris, which may be once a year for a couple weeks. There is a chessboard set up in the apartment where I stay and that I used to own. It is a chessboard I bought, and as this apartment has a convoluted story of joy and beauty and love and grief, betrayal, and loss, so do chess games have stories. Some leave me breathless as a queen fights to hang on or a bishop risks his life or a castle frets to break from the corner.

Each piece has a personality. Call it projection, or call it observation, I don’t care:

Kings – lazy, pompous, scared

Queens – determined, capable, calculating

Bishops – graceful in their oblique ways, a little sneaky coming in from the side

Knights – awkward in their armor, wanting to be valiant, often treading too far out

Castles – like all walls and parapets, less powerful than they look

Pawns – secure in their little selves, knowing they may be sacrificed, but up for the game.

Knowing the intelligence of a chess piece and being inside the game, especially when you play against yourself, builds empathy. It is a holistic exercise that resonates with the stories of your life, and the stories of others. It gets you past that only your reality is real. It forces you to be human by having to drink from the winners’ and the losers’ cup at the same time. It makes us want to be good to others.

A game a short while back ended with both kings forced out of hiding, facing each other mid-field with no protection. They hardly knew what to do. They were two King Lear’s who believed they were all-powerful now stumbling to their ends with no one to hear their whimpering. It was a tragedy of hubris. I could not take sides in this. I could only witness, and remember the story of why the apartment was no longer mine, nor even of my own King Lear.

When you don’t have empathy, you are cut off from the rest of humanity. If you do not feel what others experience, you are alone inside your version of your story. It becomes your reality and can stale quickly. You lose the richness of life, its flavors and gifts. You’re in a fairytale with no feedback or changes of scenery. “And lived happily ever after” becomes a jail.

Empathy is epic. Furthermore, it is non-fiction.

. . .

Chess games in the Luxembourg Gardens, where timers are used, and audiences second-guess you. Perhaps here it is more a blood sport than empathy.

PARIS NOTES #5 – “The Hare with Amber Eyes” or Anti-Semitism in the Neighborhood

Posted on November 4, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

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It is not the first thing you see when standing across from 81 rue Monceau, but you see it soon enough – the two faces of the Theater of Life, the tragic and the happy, in stone, mid-way up the elegant 5-story façade. Look more closely and you’ll see that Happiness is younger, innocent perhaps, while Tragedy is older, watchful, wary.

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The house was the mansion of the Ephrussi family. Like the Rothschilds and other fabulously wealthy Jewish families, they had equally wealthy powerful brothers, cousins, uncles, and aunts, in Vienna and London from the end of the 1800’s up to World War II.

Rue Monceau was central to the neighborhood of the newly wealthy Parisian Jews. Well, newly wealthy in European capitals anyway. The Ephrussi were doing very well indeed in St. Petersburg and Odessa from where they had a virtual monopoly on Russian grain trade.

The Camondo family, in an even larger mansion at 63 rue Monceau, arrived massively rich as bankers from outside of Istanbul since the Ottoman Empire. Yesterday I visited this mansion, now the Musee Nissim de Camondo. (More below on that, with photos.)

And the Rothschilds had everything needed for the five sons to branch across Europe with funds from the patriarch Mayer, banker to the royal court of Free Frankfurt. The Ephrussi followed suit, establishing their own banks. Each family collected art. Charles Ephrussi, the youngest son of Leon, the first Ephrussi to come to Paris (1871), was exempt from working in banking or anywhere else that made money. It was always clear he was the arty one.

It was Charles who bought the 264 Japanese netsuke central to “The Hare with Amber Eyes,” written by Edmund De Waal, grandson of Elizabeth Ephrussi of the Vienna branch and inheritor of this exquisite collection that bizarrely survived the ravages of war and anti-Semitism. Charles was primary source-material for Charles Swann in the novels of Marcel Proust.

Charles, an eminent art historian and critic, also collected vast numbers of paintings and supported Degas, Monet, Renoir, and other Impressionists. The family benefitted from this mode of assimilation in a culture where anti-Semitism, like a virus, was biding its time. Even our favorite Impressionists could turn. Renoir, who painted Charles into “Luncheon of the Boating Party” (the man in the back in the top hat), said, given a slight grudge, that Charles collected “only Jew art,” meaning it had gold highlights in it. So much for his soft edges and round women.

The book left me emotionally bruised by anti-Semitism in a way I have not experienced in some time. I am not Jewish, but I have married and loved Jews consistently, and my daughter and grandchildren are Jewish.

What has more formed my current feelings, however, are my connections of the past 12 years in Israel and in Palestine as the founder of Peace X Peace and editor-photographer of the book “Sixty Years, Sixty Voices: Israeli and Palestinian women,” which has gone to every UN ambassador, every US Congressperson, and thousands more people working for healthy peaceful cultures.

Over time my frustration with the Israeli government and policies has grown into anger.

It is difficult not to be angry if you check your facts and believe in truth. But this book brought me back viscerally to how it feels when no matter what good you do or how wealthy or powerful you are, or how long you have been in a place, and how assimilated you feel you are that some people will continue to think of you and condemn you as a scourge, as dirty, as vile, as rapacious.

And it showed me, with the blow-by-blow devastation of the Ephrussi family in Vienna, how monsters can evade your house almost overnight and leave you only with the clothes on your back. How your treasures can be inventoried and carried away, how the only fight you have left is figuring out how to get out of your chosen nation before you, like the treasures, are shipped away.

The book is exquisite, it is terrifying. I recommend it.

Yesterday I saw the faces of Tragedy and Happiness on the face of a mansion. I think, despite the family’s assimilation, wealth, and titles, they knew their history well.

For now I will spare you my thoughts on the current effects and wounds of that history.

Just to acknowledge its truth and burden is enough for one day.

. . .

Yesterday I also spent hours inside the Musee Nissim de Camondo. This sumptuous mansion was built by Moise Camondo in 1911. When his only son Nissim died in 1917 as an aviator on World War I, Moise decided to bequest the mansion and magnificent art, furniture, silver, and china to Les Arts Decoratifs of Paris.

The photos do not show the mansion in its full magnificence as the Impressionist paintings, most well known, are in the Louvre, Musee d’Orsay, and elsewhere.

Moise died in 1935. His daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren died in concentration camps.

PARIS NOTES #4: The Male Nude or An Exhibition of Muscle

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

You’re not allowed to take photographs inside Musee d’Orsay, my favorite museum in Paris. Yes, other people, more sophisticated perhaps, may go to smaller specialized museums, the Guimet Museum of Asian Art, the Rodin, or La Musee Nissim de Camondo, for example. And the Louvre is filled with tourists and the occasional connoisseur checking out this masterpiece or that red on black vase depicting a chariot race from 400 BC.

But for me, it’s the d’Orsay, and today was my first return in three years. The catalyst was the grand exhibition of male nudes now on view, specifically “The Nude Man in Art from 1800 to the Present Day.” And there he was!

Strange how muscle-bound males are not all that exciting. Neither are the perils of barely clad saints such as Sebastian, a favorite subject with those arrows stuck in his chest and buttocks. Just what angle were the archers shooting from?

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Achilles, with or without an arrow in his ankle, wassimilarly a model of muscular repose, and Prometheus, even with the vulture eating his kidney, seemed to have the world under control. Why not with those abs and biceps?

Hiding behind a half-wall, I snapped the portrait of Prometheus (1868) by Gustave Moreau before the guard caught me. (Moreau has his own little museum to be visited in the next few days as I hear he shocked his peers by hallucinatory. Let’s see.)

Hermes was slightly more charming, youth that he is with that cute little hat, as was John the Baptist as a boy, radiating faith. It made me think about how people believe the religion they are taught until they are old enough to accept that not only do their parents lie but maybe their culture also, and maybe the story is too large for only one version.

It wasn’t until the early 1900’s that naked men could be portrayed as what I’m used to, skinnier and prone to listing this way or that. It happened with the advent of photography and self portraits. And people such as Francis Bacon who threw red and yellow paint around like wounds of existential angst.

Yet, the heroic vision of the male body as muscle remained. Think of the photos of Mapplethope for one.

So there I was, a woman trying to find the men within the bodies. It was difficult to do. I think it is sometimes difficult for men also.

Leaving I saw a young man, fully clothed, kissing a young woman. I whipped out my iphone and took a photo before the guard charged. He did, but I had seen love unmuscle-bound, and I liked it, and I understood it, and I got the photo.

PARIS NOTES #3: Art as GOD

Posted on October 26, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

Art is not God Unique in France. It is but one god in the panoply of Olympians, along with children, food, wine, great shoes and scarves, élan, and the ability to make sex elegant wherever.

I will avoid here the demons of politics, taxes, unemployment, price of apartments, immigration, and other pesky things that perturb the sangfroid public (national cool). They exist, mais oui, but I have seen more outrageously wonderful clothes than ever before here. Even the tourists have upped their style quotient. They got the memo.

Oh, I forgot the dogs. The French love dogs, but you already knew that. They love dogs of all sizes, but most dogs are small so they fit inside small apartments. So far I’ve only seen one large dog. In from the suburbs?

Back to art.

Now, October 24-27, is FIAC, the annual international fair where the major galleries handling contemporary works come from the great art centers—Paris, New York, Zurich, and Berlin mainly—to exhibit across the heart of Paris, indoors and out.

Yesterday, I walked from the apartment in the 6th arrondissement to the Louvre and then the length of gardens to the Tuileries (literally through statues) to the Grand Palais where I wandered, stunned. The “selfie” of me in front of the mirrored insect cage tells all.

Three hours later I emerged, having passed on going to the balconies that contained the second half of the exposition. Walking back along the Seine, through a drizzle under a leopard-patterned umbrella, I was dazed. Everything always is a possibility for exploration, for breaking through to freedom, to playing one’s lute strings, for dancing with the panoply of gods.

Enjoy this small taste of the art and people inside the Grand Palais:

PARIS NOTES #2: Ode to Older Men or The Glass Ball

Posted on October 26, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

In my last blog I said that old men with remorse were as common as corn in Iowa and that an old man without remorse was a rare and precious being, or too stupid to know his mistakes or too scared to acknowledge them. I woke on my fourth day in Paris prepared to write of street musicians and art and cathedral bells, but feel first the need to put more nuance on what I said.

I never said most old men should feel remorse, but I do say that most do feel remorse, and most of those have reason to. Note: I’m speaking of Western men, they are my vast field of experience.

Look around. Who are the saddest, old men or old women? Is it the majority of old men or old women who giggle, hug, and twinkle? Yesterday I was on Skype with my 96-year-old mother and when I told her I loved her, she said “I’m glad I kept you.” Try beating that.

My life contains older men who do laugh, hug, make jokes, and twinkle, who lived, and live, with integrity and empathy. Those qualities, along with great storytelling, burnished their being. They glow. I’m writing this blog so they know I see.

My life can be played as an organ, the kind in each of the cathedrals surrounding me in the 6th arrondissement. Want precious rare old men, male peers? Pull out that stop and the music broadens with divine older men. Want children zipping by as highlights? Pull out that stop and little people in bright colors run by holding hands and zooming toy airplanes.

Want the solo sounds of a lute curling upward? Pull out the stop for a younger man.

Want serenity? Pull out the stop for silence dressed as a younger man who controls a glass globe, precarious life, translucent, on his fingertips. Have him in front of the cathedral at rue Bonaparte and blvd. Saint Germain across from where Hemingway, always old and young, wrote at the restaurant Les Deux Magots.

Want transcendence? Watch the glass ball and know that reaching old age without breakage requires concentration, the light touch, recognizing what is precious, discarding what is not.

PARIS NOTES #1: to butter or not to butter

Posted on October 22, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

To butter or not to butter, that is the question. The croissant on Air France may be small compared to what will come but they are buttery enough that my childhood farmland belief that everything is “better with butter” is in conflict with my waistline and my belief that the French know best when it comes to food.

I will be in the heart of Paris in two hours, most likely having tea at Laduree on the corner of rue Jacob and rue Bonaparte in the 6th arrondissement, a block from where I once owned a duplex apartment. Said apartment was a casualty of my divorce. Non non non, said apartment was a gift from the cosmos I had for ten years until the man to whom I was once married got beyond his guilt for having a secret second life complete with apartments in Beijing and San Francisco and a woman twenty years younger and he found an arcane Virginia law where he could claim the entire apartment because his money paid for it, despite my name being on the deed for half. Zut alors!

(Ladies, when your husband cheats, massively, do not expect remorse to last, though it will most likely return with old age, as though it mattered then. Remorse in old men is as common as corn in Iowa. If an old man doesn’t have remorse, he is a rare and precious being, or too stupid to know his mistakes, or too scared to acknowledge them.)

Is it my imagination or are the heterosexual stewards on this plane flirting with me? God, I adore European men. Their radar hones right into the energy of your being rather than a wrinkle here or there.

The plane is descending, my ears are starting to plug. Paris, I am coming home. The kicker is I will be staying at my old apartment. The new owners (yes, after a couple years he sold it) needed the combination to the safe and my former soul mate, or whatever, was forced to connect us. Praise email!

Last month the new owners stayed in my apartment in New York. This month, after years of loss, I’m in theirs/”mine” on rue Jacob. The furniture and art is still there, the silver, the linens, the plates, and the espresso machine. Oui oui oui, I understand I no longer own it, but the goods, the beauties, are there on their own to be savored.

The real question is: to forgive or not forgive. Except it was always irrelevant to me, beside the point, even if it wraps this up before I turn off electronic devices.

Forgiveness is less a virtue than a tool. A handy one that raises you, use it as a crowbar, a lever, a rope ladder, and most importantly as an eraser. And eat croissant as though it were the heart of the universe.

“All electronic devices need to be turned off and your seat returned to upright position.” Landing.

Traveling Light

my fierce freedom

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