The revolution will begin in the garden

Once upon a time there was a writer who went to the kiosk to buy a newspaper. (Call me old-fashioned, nostalgic, square, but I like getting a paper newspaper. I also read news on my computer, but a paper, well, it has that tactile charm of real life. It allows you to leaf through the world at your speed and to let issues mature on the table. It allows you to tear out quotes for future reference and to smell what’s being said between the lines. Also, being an object, anyone in the house can pick it up; that might lead to good democratic discussions and, who knows, a better world.) Yes: once upon a time a writer was on his way to get a newspaper. To reach the kiosk, I must cross the Príncipe Real garden passing by its famous tree, the big Lusitanian cypress, whose branches sprawl horizontally forming an immense ceiling over our heads, a sky of greens and browns, light and shadow. Since I read “Lisboa”, by John Berger, I stopped thinking of it as a cypress. It became, instead, the tree next to which Berger (or a character called John who seems to think and speak like his author) met her mother, long dead. But why am I telling this? Oh, yes.

A month or so ago, I was invited to participate in a public talk about music and spirituality, and, when the day arrived, I found I was voiceless. It was the old irony of fate, maybe, or perhaps some form of poetic justice. The writer was supposed to put together spirit and music, and yet his breath was not capable of producing even a sound. But, today, crossing the Príncipe Real garden, I think I finally got something on that. I’m not not sure if one can put it into words, but today — the tree and the music were simultaneous.

When I got to the tree, a voice started singing. For once, I interrupted my information odyssey, stopped and listened. The song was “Desafinado” (the bossa nova standard, composed by Jobim and Newton Mendonça, and once made famous by João Gilberto). “Desafinado” means “out of tune”, but what happened was the opposite; it was like the space and the music had become in tune with each other.

Inside the city, the garden is a microcosm between brackets. The world is becoming increasingly literal, shouting statistics, platitudes and authority arguments at us; the garden is an island of silence and metaphor. It is, itself, a metaphor for a different state of mind, a new way of living. At times, it feels like a story, it lets you enjoy a little suspension of disbelief. There’s a theatrical quality to it, right? In a garden, we all become characters. (And what would my character be, exactly? The distracted local? The flâneur who needs the pretext of a newspaper to walk across the stage?)

But the garden is also the non-fiction of the mustache guy flattening a plastic bag against his knees; of the woman holding a plastic fork, playing with invisible food; of the old man, with a Portuguese beret, sitting sideways and putting his elbow on the back of the bench, an architectural gesture that turns his corner of the garden into a conversation-friendly living-room; of the young lovers, hand in hand, staring into infinity.

Príncipe Real: the garden as a place for the tremendous, wonderful tedium of being alive. They are becoming more and more important, these spaces that invite us not to do stuff. We have a lot to learn from them. Only by not doing things all the time can we get closer to our mystery, our best-hidden silences. No, the revolution will not be televised, and it will, most probably, begin in the garden.

John Berger says “songs are sung to an absence”. I remember this while listening to “Desafinado”, not only because João Gilberto is dead (no, he’s not), or because our dead love ones are alive when we let ourselves get lost in a garden, but also because music is like spirit and likes spreading through gaps, empty spaces, all those little deserts. Berger also reminds us that one always sings with hope.

When I came back to myself, I went to buy the newspaper. As I looked at the headlines, the world seemed to ask me: what’s the use of this, exactly, all this thinking about music and spirit? And, by the way, have you got any evidence to support it? I walked back home with the international crisis folded under my arm. Well, no, this is of no use at all, really. It doesn’t translate into numbers on an Excel sheet, nor it will make anyone rich in the stock market… (Once upon a time there was a writer who sighed for no apparent reason when leaving the garden.) When this literal, pragmatic, Realpolitik-ish voice of the world comes for me, I really feel out of tune, “desafinado”. I’m afraid I don’t have any stats to strike back, I don’t know how to do a PowerPoint presentation proving the importance of a garden, a tree, a song, a coincidence and having mental time to appreciate all that. But, on the relation between music and spirit, I do have evidences: Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Amália Rodrigues, John Coltrane, Cesária Évora, Nick Cave, João Gilberto, Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder.