Through Another Lens Podcast

Mark Sylvester
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The podcast that flips conventional wisdom upside down. Where hidden truths become competitive advantages. marksylvester.substack.com

  1. 18h ago

    Nobody Talks Like That

    I put two years of posts into a machine and asked one question. What do I keep coming back to? It read everything. Then it handed me this: “You return to a singular, unresolved tension. The friction between structured, automated efficiency and the raw, vulnerable somatic presence required for true human connection. This tension is never resolved. You hold both sides against each other, asking if the ease of the system is eroding our actual ability to show up.” Nobody talks like that. But it wasn’t wrong. It found the argument exactly. I’d never have put it that way, and it took me a minute to see that’s the whole point. I’m sitting in the same chair I sat in two years ago. Back then I was writing one of my first pieces and teaching myself AI at the same time. What came back scared me, and not because it was bad. It was competent. Clean sentences, correct structure, nothing I could point at and fix. It took me a while to find what was wrong, because what was wrong wasn’t in the writing. There was nobody in it. So I drew a line, and I’ve held it since. I’m the creator. The machine is the editor. It doesn’t get to make the thing. It gets to help me see the thing I made. Here’s what took me two years to notice. I’ve done this before. Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The first time I cooked for ten years. Restaurants, institutions, a knife roll and a schedule. Then I sat down at a café table in Santa Barbara with Bill Kovacs and Larry Barels, and by the time the coffee was cold we were talking about building a computer graphics company. I knew nothing. That’s not modesty, it’s the actual condition. I had come out of a kitchen into a world with its own language, its own math, its own people who had been at it for years while I was learning to break down a chicken. Every day had the potential to hand me something I couldn’t have imagined the day before. I wanted to make computer generated images. Not as a business plan. As a personal quest, the way you want to learn a piece of music or get a sauce to break the right way. And when there was something I wanted to do and couldn’t do yet, I’d go find someone on the team and describe it, and they’d conjure a tool. Then it turned out a lot of other people wanted to make computer generated images too. The second time The last two years have felt exactly like the first two years of that. Same condition. So much to learn, so much I don’t know, and every morning carrying the possibility of another unlock. Same personal quest, except now the thing I want to make is an essay instead of an image. Same wrestling with tools I don’t fully understand, and the same refusal to hand myself over to them. The one difference is that I conjure the tool myself now. Nobody down the hall builds it for me. That part I did not see coming. And it’s turning out the same way. A lot of people want their thinking to reach somebody. They can feel the difference between writing that carries a person and writing that doesn’t. That was true about images and it’s true about sentences. Same thing. Different medium. Where it breaks The parallel is nearly perfect and then it breaks, and where it breaks is the entire subject. At Wavefront, nobody worried that the software was making the film. The tool lived in one medium and the work lived in another. A renderer computes light. It has no opinion about what the shot means. You could hand it everything and it would still hand back exactly what you asked for, no more. The tool I use now works in the same medium as the work. It makes sentences. Sentences are the thing I do. That’s why I needed a line this time and didn’t need one then. I drew it before I could have explained why. Two years later, the paragraph up top explained it for me. It came back correct. It found something in two years of my writing that I had never named, and it named it in words I would not use if you paid me. Somatic presence. Structured, automated efficiency. Nobody says that at a dinner table. But the thing it named was mine. What the worry is missing We’re all worried about this now. Slop, watermarks, detectors, a whole industry standing up to answer one question. Did a person make this. The worry is real and I share it. What I notice is that it stops at authorship, as if who typed it is the only thing at stake. It isn’t. That paragraph proves something harder. A machine can find what’s true about you and still be unable to say it like a person. It got the diagnosis right and the language wrong, and we keep collapsing those into one skill when they’re two. So which one is the writing? That’s what I’ve been circling for two years without knowing it. If a system can name what I mean before I can, and I can say it in a way it never will, then where does the line I drew actually sit? I don’t have an answer. I’m spending September on it. Can a system hold you, or does it replace you? Thanks for reading Through Another Lens! This post is public so feel free to share it. [Warm downtempo soul vocal: gravelly bass-baritone, older male, chest voice, speak-sung, close-miked, dry, no vibrato, Rhodes and programmed kick underneath, analog warmth, male vocal only] I fed a machine my words Two years of them, all of it I said now tell me what I mean It took about a second I cooked ten years before this Then I learned a whole new trade I know the sound of my own voice I have earned that much It came back perfect Not one word to fix It said the thing I meant to say And there was nobody in it Nobody in it So I made a rule that morning And I have kept it ever since I write it, the machine reads it It does not hold the pen You can build a thing that helps You can hand it too much rope There is a line in there somewhere I found mine early It came back perfect Not one word to fix It said the thing I meant to say And there was nobody in it Nobody in it Then it read me back to myself Found the thing I never named Used words I would never say And the thing it found was mine Two years arguing with myself Never knew that is what it was Took a machine to say it plain In a voice that was not mine It came back perfect Not one word to fix And it was true And it was right And there was nobody in it Nobody in it Somebody has to be in it Somebody has to be in it Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe

  2. Aug 30

    The One Story

    There’s a photograph of my father on the deck of a ship. I don’t have it, only a picture of it on my phone, and I couldn’t tell you where the print went. He’s nineteen. Cigarette in the corner of his mouth, hands on his hips, deck jacket open over a sweater, looking straight down the lens like the camera owes him money. A crane behind him, a deck winch beside him, ships out on the water. He is the only thing in the frame that isn’t working. James Russell Sylvester. United States Navy, Second World War. Nineteen and colder than he wants to be. He didn’t talk about the war. What I had growing up was that he worked in the kitchen and made ice cream. For most of my life, that’s what my father did in the Navy. He made ice cream. He made it on a ship, in a war that ended before I was born. I never tasted any of it. The one he told There was one story. Before a landing craft drops its ramp, it has to hit the beach straight. Come in sideways and the next wave takes it broadside and rolls it. Turtles it, was the word at our house. So men went over the side into the surf with ropes, holding the boat square while it ran in. My father was one. I don’t know the island and never will. I couldn’t tell you whether he said eight men or two, and I’ve caught myself telling it both ways. The Navy had a name for the rope. Anti-broaching line, printed in the manual with a diagram, held by a beach party that came ashore with the third wave. On a real beach, in the first wave, the rope existed and the hands didn’t. Whatever my father was doing out there, he was improvising a fix for something the Navy had written down and not yet manned. He never put it that way. He gave me four sentences and was done. Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. What my brother told me At his memorial service in July of 2022, on what would have been his birthday, my brother told me our father had been the cook for the executive officer and senior staff. The wardroom. He fed the men who ran the ship. I was sixty-nine years old, standing at the end of the Santa Barbara breakwater with my family, and that was new information. I’ve spent my working life around kitchens. In the summer of 1971, at eighteen, I learned to cook in a diner in Auburn, California, flipping pinto beans in a dry pan until I could do it without spilling them, and weeks later put two eggs in two pans on Van Nuys Boulevard and landed them clean. That’s the whole reason I had the career I had. I knew my father worked in a galley. I did not know he ran the officers’ mess. Nobody told me until he was dead. I asked my brother again this week. Nothing more, and I’m fairly sure he’s forgotten he ever told me about the wardroom. So what’s left is my memory of my brother’s memory of a man who didn’t talk. The list There’s one more piece. When the ship made port, my father was handed a list and sent ashore to do the buying. The officers didn’t eat out of the ship’s stores. He walked into markets in countries he’d never seen and bought the food. For twenty years I traveled the world for the software company I helped start, and the best mornings were the ones I got up early in some city and went to the food market. I couldn’t cook on those trips, I was there to work, and I went anyway every time and couldn’t have told you why. Nobody told me about my father’s list until years after I’d left that company. I’d have liked to walk one of those markets knowing he’d done the same thing. The sentence I said something this week I’ve said for years. I don’t have veterans in my life. I care about the work and support people who do it, but I’ve never sat with one. Everything I know is secondhand. I said it four days after standing in the lobby of a TEDx in Columbiana, Ohio, with my arms around a Green Beret. That’s Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, United States Army, retired. Twenty-three years in uniform, nearly eighteen of them in Special Forces. He goes to that TEDx every year to coach veterans through their talks, and I see him there and hug him because I love the man. Doc Diego was there too. He’s a psychologist, he works with Scott, and his whole subject is what soldiers carry home and can’t put down. We talked twice, at length, and I could have gone all day. The first sentence This week I went back and reread a piece I published in February of last year. It opens like this. My best friend, Tom, just got his draft notice. Vietnam is calling, and that’s it. That’s the final push we need. July of 1971. I’d graduated from high school a month before. Tom’s notice came, we got in the car and left Los Angeles with six weeks to burn. Somewhere north, around midnight, a pickup pulled up beside us at a red light and Tom went rigid. It was his father, the one he hadn’t seen in years, in a town neither of us could have named. He motioned us to follow. We followed the taillights to a house on the edge of Auburn. Tom and his father went inside. I stayed on the porch with a borrowed blanket and the crickets. That is the last of Tom. Two thousand more words about a kid learning he could survive a hundred plates on a Friday night, and the man whose draft notice started the car is gone by paragraph two. I published that eighteen months ago and never noticed. He reported. My number came up the following February and was never called, because the draft ended that December. He went and I didn’t. Then I lost touch with him. That’s the phrase I’ve always used, and it isn’t true either. Tom married a girl we met on that trip. She outlived him, and she has been at the edges of my family ever since, close to people I love, one phone call away for thirty years. His widow never went anywhere. I did. I didn’t lose Tom’s world. I stayed right next to it. I lost Tom. He’s dead now. I don’t know when, or how, or what he brought back with him, or whether anybody ever asked him. The habit In November of 2019, Scott walked onto our TEDxSantaBarbara stage and gave a talk he called The Generosity of Scars. He opened it in character, dying, a medic working his chest. Then he stepped out of the scene and told a theater full of strangers about the afternoon he stood in his bedroom closet with a loaded pistol and no intention of coming out alive. He heard his son get home from school. That’s the only reason he walked out. Six months later he told that story to a friend from Afghanistan who was somewhere darker still, and watched the color come back into the man’s face. He’d written a play about all of it by then. Last Out, four actors, twenty-eight cities. On our stage he cut scenes out of it and set them into eighteen minutes, stepping in and out of character and back again. My wife Kymberlee helped him build it. She was his speaking coach. I was in the wings, where I’ve watched a hundred talks go out. They were on their feet before he was off the stage. I watched that from behind him. I’ve been repeating that phrase for seven years like a man who understood it. The generosity is in setting the thing down where we can see it, on purpose, knowing the price, and it only works if somebody picks it up. My father put four sentences on the table and I let them sit for fifty years. My brother filled in the rest four years ago and I still said this week that I don’t have veterans in my life. Tom’s whole war I turned into the first paragraph of a story about myself. Neither of those men was out of reach. One of them lived until 2022. I have his widow’s number. I called her this week and she hasn’t called back. She has known for thirty years what happened to Tom, and in thirty years I never once asked. My niece married a Marine. Brian stood honor guard at Arlington, folding flags into triangles for widows he’d never met. When my father died he arranged a ceremony there for a Navy man who isn’t buried in that ground. He had a flag flown in my father’s name, and he brought my brother and me each one. We didn’t scatter him. My brother has an urn and so do I. My father’s ashes are in this room and the flag is right next to them. A surgeon rebuilt my left shoulder on Tuesday, so I’ve spent this week sitting still, talking into a phone because I can’t reach a keyboard. Sitting a few feet from both of them, saying out loud that I don’t have veterans in my life. If you’re a veteran in crisis, or you’re worried about one, the Veterans Crisis Line is 988, then press 1. Here are the lyrics to Four Sentences Nineteen on the deck of a ship Cigarette in the corner of his lip He is looking at me like I owe him And I don’t know the half of him He made ice cream out on that ship In a war that ended before me I never tasted any of it And that’s the whole of what I knew Four sentences about the war And then he never said no more Four sentences on the table I let them sit there fifty years Four sentences on the table Nobody comes and clears Men went over into the surf Ropes to hold the boat from the roll Was it eight of them or was it two I have told it both ways, that’s the truth He bought the food in foreign towns Handed a list and put ashore I walked those markets twenty years And never knew he’d walked them before Four sentences on the table I let them sit there fifty years Four sentences on the table Nobody comes and clears There’s a boy on a porch in Auburn With a blanket and the crickets and the dark His best friend’s inside with his father And a draft notice folded in the car I said I don’t know any soldiers I have said it half my life His ashes are here in the room with me And a flag folded up tight Four sentences on the table I let them sit there fifty years Four sentences on the table And now there’s nobody to hear He made ice cream I never tasted I never once asked him about it He was in the room the

  3. Aug 23

    Some Change

    This edition has a companion song, “Some Change,” written from the essay. The link is at the end of the piece. Press play, then read. The plane out of Santa Barbara was twenty minutes late, which meant the connection in Denver was already tight before we landed. My hip has me on a cane these days, which earns us early boarding and costs us speed everywhere else, and the terminal was the most crowded I’d seen in years, everyone walking fast in different directions at the same time. Stopping for any reason felt like an indulgence I couldn’t afford. I stopped anyway. There was a voice, the internal kind that doesn’t explain itself, and it said stop, take the picture, you’ll figure it out. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I just knew I needed it. Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The wall What I was looking at was a sign, dark brown lacquer, gold letters raised enough to read in braille underneath: Courtesy Phone. Above it, a No Smoking placard. Below it, an actual phone, the kind that used to hang in every kitchen in America, cream-colored, the handset heavy in a way plastic doesn’t feel anymore, a cord that coiled down toward the floor like it had given up trying to reach anyone. Around it, an Exit sign, a fire pull box, a keypad with a strip of red tape across the top. Emergency equipment on every side. And in the middle, one plaque that wasn’t emergency anything. It said courtesy. Kymberlee was next to me. Nobody else was looking at that wall. A phone nobody was going to use, promising something nobody rushing past had time for. The confession I took the picture instead of picking up the phone, which is its own kind of confession. Whatever that phone offered, I didn’t take it. I wanted proof that it existed more than I wanted the thing itself. We made the Pittsburgh flight with nothing to spare, and the moment I sat down I started writing. I don’t always do that. I’m always watching for the moment in a week that intrigued me, that’s the job I’ve given myself, but it’s rare that one grabs me hard enough that the seatbelt sign is still on and I’m already typing. This one did, and I think it’s because of the six weeks I’d just spent building a website for a friend, a poet-philosopher who has spent forty years writing about the space between what people say and what they mean. Working inside somebody’s language for that long changes how you walk through a day. You start seeing signs, literally and otherwise. So when I saw this one, the only person I sent it to was him. His name is Noah benShea. Author of the Jacob the Baker books, the ones that ended up on Starbucks cups and hospital meal trays, translated into languages he doesn’t speak. I’d been living inside his sentences for a month and a half, and the picture went to him before I’d walked away from the wall. Do you have change He wrote back before we boarded. First he said the whole thing was a kind of prayer, that you’d have to get on your knees just to make a phone like that answer. Then, in the next breath: I love this. Do you need some change to make the call on that phone, because there’s another anomaly here. It’s some old phone. Courtesy, does anybody even know what that word means anymore. And if you had to use change, do you have change. He thought the whole thing was hilarious. He was right. Underneath the joke was the actual question, the one he’s spent a career asking without ever making it sound like a question. When was the last time you had change for anything. The free call Somewhere over the Rockies I worked out what the sign probably meant. A courtesy phone is a free call. It’s a courtesy from a day when a call cost money, a nickel, a dime, a quarter, a day before everyone carried a thousand-dollar phone in their pocket. The airport was saying: here, this one’s on us. Which only deepens the anomaly. It’s not for staff, staff have radios. It’s for a traveler, a stranger, someone who needed to reach somebody and didn’t have the coin. Somebody once looked at a terminal full of strangers and decided the building itself should be kind to them, and wired a wall to prove it. The fire pull is for an emergency. The exit sign is for getting out. The keypad is for getting in. Every other thing on that wall assumes something has gone wrong or needs protecting. Courtesy assumes nothing’s wrong. It just sits there, running on faith, the kind Noah named, where you get on your knees and hope whoever’s on the other end decides to pick up. Still on the wall Nobody uses it anymore, obviously. But somebody kept the plaque up, kept the phone wired, kept the sign polished enough to catch a wandering eye at a gate nobody remembers the number of. That’s the part I keep turning over. Not the phone. The fact that it’s still on the wall, in a building otherwise engineered to keep your eyes moving forward, rush, rush, gate change, boarding group, no time to read anything that doesn’t apply to you. I’ve been writing this since the wheels left Denver and I still can’t answer the simplest version of the question. If I’d picked it up, and it worked, and someone answered, who would I have called, and what would I have said. I had a cane in one hand and a phone worth a thousand courtesy calls in the other, and no change on me at all. Listen to “Some Change” on Suno Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe

    Some Change

  4. Aug 16

    Small Towns Need Big Ideas

    There’s a song for this one. The Last Ten Feet. First session had just let out. I was standing in the doorway between the theater and the lobby, taking the temperature. How’s everybody doing. Enjoying it so far. That kind of thing. A guy came up to me. “Are you the TEDx guy?” I don’t know what made him pick me. Maybe I looked official. Maybe I looked like I didn’t live there. “How could I help?” He said, “Why did you bring TED to our small town?” I didn’t blink. “Because small towns need big ideas.” He said thank you. I said, “Next year when I come back, I want you to bring twenty of your friends.” Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The red letters We didn’t bring TED to Columbiana. TED is the big conference. Big Ted, we call it. Vancouver for years, San Diego next. What’s in Columbiana is a TEDx, independently organized under license, run by people who live there. He didn’t know that. Almost nobody does. He’d been watching talks in front of big red letters his whole adult life, on a phone, on a laptop, on a screen some teacher pulled down in a classroom. Now the letters were in his town and he was sitting in front of them. So he had the facts wrong and the feeling exactly right. Something did come to his town. I wasn’t going to be the guy who corrected him on the licensing. And I know why he thought it. Because the set was very good. A thousand talks I’ve been going to TED since 1994. A thousand talks, give or take, live in a room. That’s a strange thing to be able to say out loud, and what it gives you is a bar. You learn what a room feels like when a talk lands. You learn how much of that is the talk and how much is the room it landed in. When the chance came to produce them, we started at home, with TEDxSantaBarbara, and built a reputation for shows that ran clean. That’s how Greg Smith found us. Greg lives in Columbiana, Ohio. Six thousand people, a traffic circle, and a theater on Main Street that everybody calls the CAT. He came to us years ago and said he wanted to bring this to his hometown, and would we help him figure out what that looks like. My wife Kymberlee and I have been helping him produce it ever since. I’ve been producing or helping produce these since 2010, and I hold teams to a standard. The letters. The lighting. Where a speaker walks on and where the light finds them. The transitions. The sound. Months go into all of it, and the reason is simple. Nobody sitting in that theater should have to grade on a curve. A town that gets a lesser show learns it deserves a lesser one. So a man sat down on Main Street in a town of six thousand and watched something that looked exactly like what he’d been watching on his phone for the better part of twenty years. Of course he thought TED came to town. That isn’t an accident. That’s the job. He’d been through one other thing that morning, and it matters more than it sounds. Nearly everyone has seen a TED talk. Alone. On a screen, while doing something else, and then you close the tab and go back to your life. Almost nobody has sat in a room for a whole day of them. Fourteen or more of them in a row do something the same talks can’t do one at a time. They start talking to each other. A line from the second one lands differently after the ninth. Your brain stops evaluating and starts absorbing. And you’re not alone in it. You’re shoulder to shoulder with people who heard the same thing at the same second, and when it breaks, you all spill into the lobby at once and the room gets loud. That’s what he’d walked out of when he found me. The electrical room Here’s what he didn’t see. Backstage at the CAT is the electrical room. Blue panels down one wall, a rack of red parts bins, a commercial vacuum parked next to the fire extinguisher. Somebody hung a red clothes hanger off a ceiling pipe. The greenroom is a garage on a residential street, string lights and folding tables and bottled water in red plastic baskets. Nobody cleaned any of it up. Nobody was going to. Every TEDx backstage on earth looks roughly like this. The front of the house is designed to be seen. The back of the house is designed to get people ready. The clipboard The two women in that photograph are a speaker and her coach. The coach is Kymberlee. She spends six months with each of these people. Helps them find the idea, cut it to the bone, build it, then teaches them how to walk out and deliver the talk of their life in ten minutes with nothing in their hands. Look at what’s still in hers. That’s the clipboard with the speaker’s script on it. Kymberlee follows every line from the wings, watching a monitor you can’t see from this angle, pushing everything she has at the stage. Ten minutes of not breathing. The speaker came off. Kymberlee never put the clipboard down. She opened her arms with it still in her hand. And she’s the one with her eyes closed. Nobody claps for her. I’ve been on the receiving end of that hug. One year a speaker came off and found me. Big guy, my height and my weight, and he sank into my arms and I had to hold him up. People underestimate what these speakers put themselves through. Six months of work and six months of dread, compressed into ten minutes, in front of everyone they know, with no notes and nowhere to hide. Then the ovation. Then they walk off, and the whole structure they’ve been holding up lets go at once. They melt. Almost every one of them. You can feel the relief come off them. That’s the photograph. It’s the part nobody sees, and it’s the part I’d put first. We’ve produced hundreds of these talks by now, and here’s what makes six months a reasonable price. One person, one day, ten minutes. It changes the life of the person who gave it, almost without exception. Then it goes up on ted.com, and it can reach thousands of people neither of us will ever meet. That’s the arithmetic Kymberlee is running in the wings with the clipboard in her hand. She isn’t counting whether it goes well. She’s counting who it reaches. No second tier The guy in the lobby wasn’t asking why TED. He was asking why here. Because a town of six thousand can hold the same ideas as a city of six million. The second tier was never a size. It’s a choice about what somebody’s willing to build in the back, where nobody claps. Small towns need big ideas. And I meant the other part. Bring twenty of your friends. There’s a song for this one. The Last Ten Feet. TEDxColumbiana is an independently organized TED event held at the Columbiana Arts Theater in Columbiana, Ohio. Photograph published with permission. Thanks for reading Through Another Lens! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe

  5. Aug 9

    The Butterfly That Wouldn't Leave

    ♪ This one comes with a song, “Butterfly Lane.” Linked at the end. ♪ We were finishing a business meeting at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History; Jonah was our host when he asked if we had a few more minutes. We checked our watches, the way you do when you are trying to look responsible, and said sure, what’s up. Would you like to see the butterflies, he said. We said yes before he finished the sentence. He already had the look of someone who knows the thing he is about to show you is going to make the rest of the day irrelevant. On the way, he opened a door we would have walked past a hundred times without noticing, no sign on it, and took us down a hallway that was not part of any tour. He stopped us at a pane of glass we did not know was there. On the other side, a tech was unboxing a shipment of chrysalises just in from Costa Rica, lined up like cargo, each one a butterfly that had not happened yet. It is not the kind of thing you think about when you buy a ticket. Somebody has to receive the shipment Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The sound first The exhibit is called Butterflies Alive, though everyone just calls it the pavilion. The permanent structure has its own name too, the Sprague Butterfly Pavilion, built in 2018, and it turns out it was nominated for Best Butterfly Garden in USA Today’s 10Best awards last year. I did not know that until I went looking. What caught me off guard was the sound. Step into that netted enclosure at the edge of the museum grounds and you hear it right away, a thousand sets of wings moving at once, quiet but never actually silent. I did not expect that. They call the path through it a lazy river, which is exactly right. You move with the current, families and children drifting from one section to the next, and every few minutes a chime sounds to mark the transition. The chime is not for atmosphere. It is the signal to check yourself before you leave, to make sure nothing has decided to come with you. A tail, apparently We were somewhere in the middle of the river when Jim said, quietly, that I had a tail. I turned to look and could not see it, which is the nature of tails, and there was only so far I could twist without doing something ridiculous. Jim took a picture instead and turned his phone around so I could see. An owl butterfly had landed on the tail of my shirt, right at my waist, and it had been there long enough that it had apparently made a decision. I did not reach back to check for myself. The last thing I wanted was to hurt it. It was not resting. It had chosen. The wings were open and still, the eyespots looking out at the room with the calm authority of something that does not worry about meetings or agendas I did not try to stay still. I just kept walking, aware the whole time that I was carrying a passenger, something that had made its own decision about where it wanted to be. People gathered the way people do around small beautiful things. Someone took photographs. The butterfly stayed through all of it, through the attention and the murmuring and the phones, apparently unbothered by any of it, and it held on for nearly the whole walk. There is a specific kind of stillness that comes over you when something wild has decided you are safe. It is not the stillness of standing frozen. It is the stillness of being momentarily reclassified. Jim’s turn Jim got tagged too. He sat down for a second on a bench along the river and a giant swallowtail landed on his leg, wings folded up in that yellow and black checkerboard they wear. He did not want to move, and as far as I could tell he did not, not until it decided on its own to leave. Both of us walked out of that pavilion having been chosen for something, whatever that something was The blue morphos never stopped moving, which is how they survive, that impossible blue coming from structure-bending light rather than pigment, never sitting still long enough to photograph. I stopped trying and just watched, which is what you are supposed to do anyway. Butterfly Lane On the way out, I mentioned to Jonah that the street behind our house, probably three miles from where we were standing, is called Butterfly Lane. He knew it, of course. I have lived in Santa Barbara fifty-four years now, and I found that name decades before I ever lived near it, back when it still sounded like a rumor, and it took years to understand it was not one. It is named for the migration that used to happen there every year, tens of thousands of monarchs arriving in the eucalyptus groves to overwinter. In the twenty years we have lived in Montecito we have walked that street more times than I can count, down to Butterfly Beach and back, a stretch of sand that stays mostly local because you have to already know it is there, eucalyptus towering on both sides the whole way, and I still close my eyes sometimes and try to see what it looked like when those trees were actually dripping with them. The numbers now are a fraction of what they were. I already knew that. Days like this one just make it heavier. A hundred monarchs About ten years ago, a friend handed us a chrysalis, the kind of thing that sends you straight back to sixth-grade science class, and we watched it through to the end. We loved it enough that within a few years we had a garden full of milkweed and were doing it on purpose, caterpillar to chrysalis to wing, launching them off our own back porch into their six weeks of life. We probably helped a hundred of them make that trip. Every stage of it felt like a small magic trick performed slowly enough that you could see how it worked. Now, when we are out somewhere in town and one drifts past, usually while everyone else keeps walking, we stop. We do not say much. We just watch it, then look at each other, both of us back on that porch for a second before it flies off. Checking for hitchhikers The chime sounded before the exit, the reminder to check. A volunteer was waiting there with a feather duster and had us spin around slowly while she checked us for hitchhikers, working the duster along our shoulders and sleeves like she had done it a thousand times, because she had. There is also a large mirror so you can inspect yourself, and an exhaust fan above the door that discourages anything from slipping through regardless. I checked my shirttail in the mirror. The owl butterfly was already gone, sometime between the chime and the mirror, departed without ceremony back into the warm air of the pavilion. We walked out with the kind of smiles you cannot manufacture, and the agenda from earlier was already ancient history. I said it then and still mean it: every meeting should end this way, a little recreation and a little education bolted onto the back end. But the afternoon had already been reclassified, and my waist still carries a kind of memory that is hard to explain to anyone who was not there. ♪ Listen to “Butterfly Lane”: suno.com/s/9TA3jLYk6DbQj9sI ♪ Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe

  6. Aug 2

    Got Your Back

    🎧 This one's also up as an episode. Hit play above, or keep reading below. “Got your back.” That’s what Harnoor said, hand on my shoulder, thirty seconds before we walked out to do something neither of us had done in front of an audience before. Just the two of us. Two-prov, the form where there’s nowhere to hide, nobody else in the scene to lean on. Fifty Years Two months before that night, Harnoor told me they were putting a two-prov show together and asked if I wanted to try it with him. There are fifty years between us. My first thought wasn’t the one you’d expect from a future scene partner. It was closer to a question: why me? I could have spent a week running that scene in my head, finding every reason fifty years makes this the wrong pairing. Instead I answered what he’d actually asked, not what I assumed was underneath it. I said yes. I said the same thing. Got your back. Then we walked out to two chairs and a black curtain and nothing else. No idea, not one single idea, of what either of us was about to say. And I felt safe. That’s the part that still gets me. Not excited, though I was that too. Not nervous, though I was that too. Safe. The kind of safe you feel when you’ve done the reps, and you know it, when the only thing left to do is stop thinking and let go. Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Reps It took years to earn that tap on the shoulder. Classes, then more classes. Years of group scenes where you could always step back if you froze, let someone else carry the moment while you found your feet again. Two-prov takes that away on purpose. There’s no back row. You either trust what you’ve built with your partner or you don’t walk out at all. Harnoor and I walked out because the reps were already banked. The rehearsal wasn’t for the audience. It was so that on the night, neither of us had to think. Two-prov strips out everything you’d normally lean on. In a group scene you can watch, wait, step in when you’re ready. With just two of you, you’re always on. You look at your partner, and in an instant you’re reading a character off the way they’re standing, the set of their face, before either of you has said a word. Then someone speaks, and whatever they say becomes the reality of the scene. Not what you planned, not what you saw in them a second ago, but what they actually said. The World Now I remember one where I clocked Harnoor looking tired before we walked out, and I had a line ready, something about a hard day at work. He beat me to it. He came out as the one running late. “Sorry, professor, I know I don’t really have an excuse.” And that was the world now. I’m a professor. He’s a student. He’s late, and some part of me had to decide, right there, whether this was the first time or the tenth, whether I was the professor who let it slide or the one who didn’t. I didn’t get to keep the story I walked out with. I had to answer the one he actually gave me. That’s the whole form, right there. You build a world out of nothing, hand it to your partner, and then you live inside whatever they hand back. No net. No do-over. You can’t talk your way back to the version you had in your head. Here’s what took me longer to see. That’s not an improv skill. That’s the skill. The tap on the shoulder before we walked out wasn’t a promise that nothing would go wrong. It was a promise that whatever version of the scene showed up, tired or late or off-script, I’d stay in it with him. Got your back doesn’t mean I’ll protect you from what’s true. It means I won’t leave the room when the truth walks in wearing a different face than I expected. Off Stage I’d already done that once, before I ever stood on those two chairs. Harnoor asked, and the rehearsed answer was every reason fifty years between us made this the wrong pairing. I didn’t give that answer. I said yes, and found out the assumption was the only thing in the way. I notice the same reflex off the stage now, in meetings, in conversations headed somewhere I didn’t plan for, when someone walks in already carrying something- a bad morning, a decision half made- and my instinct is to run the scene I’d already written in my head. Drop the line you rehearsed. Answer the person actually in front of you. Harnoor and I didn’t get good at this by talking about it. We got good at it by doing it badly, in front of people, enough times that the thinking finally got out of the way. Nobody tells you that’s how you arrive at trust. You don’t decide to trust your instincts. You rehearse your way into it, so many times that on the night it matters, there’s nothing left to do but let go. The Other Sixty Here’s the math I keep coming back to. An hour with those two chairs is supposed to move something in the sixty hours of life that come after it. Not the bit, the practice that gets you there. If it only shows up under a black curtain, it’s a hobby. If it’s still there Tuesday morning in a meeting, or at dinner, or on the phone with someone having a hard week, the hour on stage was never the point. It was the rehearsal for the other sixty. Two people, two chairs, no net. Turns out that’s not a stripped-down version of real life. It’s the most honest version I’ve found. You don’t get to choose who walks into the scene or what they bring with them. You only get to decide, before you walk out there, whether you’ve got their back. 🎧 This Sunday Story runs as a podcast too, if you'd rather listen next time. Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe

  7. Jul 26

    A Photograph of a Photograph

    A note before you start. This one comes with a song called Both Words. Put it on while you read if you like, or save it for the end. Either way it belongs to the piece. Their anniversary was Thursday, and I missed it, which is how this started. I went digging through my phone for pictures of the wedding, three years back now, and the first thing that came up wasn’t the ceremony at all. It was a picture I’d taken of a picture. My mother, in a veil and wire glasses, standing next to my father in a dark suit at the front of a church, candles behind them and white flowers in tall stands on either side. Somebody had brought that portrait to the wedding and set it out on a table where people would walk past it. I stopped and photographed it with my phone because I don’t own a copy myself. I still don’t. A wedding I got to write. Elsa is my niece. She and Brian asked me to marry them, which I had never done, and I said yes before I’d finished hearing the question. Then I sat down and realized I didn’t actually know them. Not as adults. I knew a kid I’d seen at intervals and a young man I’d met a handful of times, and I had a wedding to write. So I went after it. Phone calls, questions, the kind of research you do when you’re afraid of standing up in front of a hundred people with nothing true to say. It took weeks. It worked. Brian served in the honor guard at Arlington. That’s a young man in dress blues standing at attention beside the worst day of a stranger’s life, folding a flag into a triangle for a widow he has never met. Elsa is trained as an expert in American Sign Language, so her whole skill is making sure a person gets understood when the ordinary channel doesn’t reach them. They have both built a life around showing up for people who need something. I stood between them on July 23, 2023, at an old brick house in Virginia that had been there since the Civil War, in a gray suit with a black folder, and gave the talk. Elsa’s veil ran all the way down to the brick. Brian wore a blue suit that struck me as exactly the right amount of confident It took me until this week to notice what was happening in that photograph. A man whose training is standing in a formal role at somebody else’s threshold. A woman whose training is closing the gap when communication fails. And me in the middle, doing both jobs at once, for the only time in my life. Officiating puts you eighteen inches from two people at the exact moment they become each other’s family, close enough to hear them breathing, and the whole job is to say the words and then get out of the frame. I got out of the frame. Came home, and went straight back to seeing Elsa at twelve years old, all elbows and momentum, running around somebody’s yard. The arithmetic People assume there has to be a rupture behind a gap like that. There was a fight, if you want one. My brother and I went at each other constantly as kids, and I moved out at seventeen. We patched it up years ago, and we’ve been fine since, so the fight isn’t the answer. The answer is arithmetic. He’s 71, and I’m 73, two years apart, and he married late and had Elsa when he was nearly forty. By the time she was that kid on the lawn, my own daughter was grown. Opposite coasts, different decades of the same life. Nobody chose it. Our calendars never once overlapped, and then it was thirty years later. Dinner on the way south In June, Amy texted. Elsa’s mother, two full weeks ahead, asking whether Kymberlee and I would be around, because she and Elsa were driving down to see Elsa’s grandmother and wanted to stop for dinner. We ate outside. June gloom, that gray lid Santa Barbara puts on the start of summer, everybody in sweatshirts by six. Elsa wore an oversized tour shirt from 1993, the year before she was born, with soft pants and sneakers, dressed for comfort rather than company. She’s pregnant. Her first, my brother’s first grandchild, due any day now, possibly the day this goes out. What I remember from that dinner isn’t the baby. Elsa and Amy ordered in tandem and then ate off each other’s plates without ever discussing it. One would reach across with a fork, and the other wouldn’t look up, because there was nothing to look up about. They have obviously been doing it for years. I watched from across the table and felt something rise in my chest that I’d have to call intense happiness, which is a strange amount of feeling to have about two women sharing a meal. It took me a while to work out why the volume was so high. I was a latchkey kid, and I’ve written before about seeing my father twice a year, so I’ll leave that part where it is. What I haven’t said is what a twice-a-year childhood does to everything around it. Nobody drove anybody anywhere to sit at a table together. When I met Kymberlee, part of what pulled me toward her family was that they did it constantly, on a Tuesday, for no particular reason. Nobody over there thought a shared meal was an occasion. I did. I still do. Elsa and my daughter Melissa are close. They talk most days. I know that because Melissa told me. My mother’s face What I love in Elsa is the way she looks at things. Bright and sparkly, lit up before she’s even decided whether the news is good. It’s very Sylvester. It’s also my mother’s. My mother died in 2012. Elsa was seventeen. There were seventeen years when both of them were alive inside the same family, and I could not tell you whether they ever sat in a room together. That’s the sentence that stopped me cold this week. The answer is one phone call away. Amy would pick up, she’d know instantly, and she’d be glad I asked. I’ve had her number the whole time. So this isn’t distance doing something to me. This is a thing I have not done. Which also means the resemblance may not be mine to hand over. It could be the ordinary observation on their side, said at every Thanksgiving I wasn’t at, so worn in that Elsa has heard it since she was a girl. Or nobody has ever said it. I can’t tell you which, and that’s the part I keep turning over. Missing the years costs you the years, and everybody knows that going in. What nobody warns you about is losing the ability to tell whether the thing you noticed is rare or completely ordinary. The folder Here’s what I can’t get around. I have already closed this gap once. I did it in a matter of weeks, well enough to stand up in Virginia and say true things about two people in front of everyone who loved them. I know how to do this. I’ve proved I know how. I only did it because somebody handed me a folder. That’s the mechanism. Please give me a role, and I’ll cross any distance you name. Please send me an occasion with a date attached, and I’ll handle it thoroughly. Without one I’ll stand at the edge for thirty years and call the whole thing circumstance. Both words She’s due any day. Somebody is going to hand me a title again, and I’ll take it, the way I always do. She’s been handing me one since she could talk. She calls me Uncle Mark. She has always used both words, and I notice it every single time, which probably means some part of me has been treating the title as a loan. Amy texted two weeks ahead. Melissa and Elsa talk most days. Elsa says, Uncle Mark. I’ve spent thirty years grading the Sylvesters as a family that doesn’t do this, while they did it in my direction the whole time, with no occasion attached and nobody assigning it. The next time she says it, I’m going to answer. Listen to Both Words on Suno: https://suno.com/s/SS1m6iRyoi9WLWhP Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe

  8. Jul 19

    The Photographs Weren't Mine

    A note before you start. This one comes with a song called None of It Was Mine. If you’d rather listen first, the link is at the end. Two hours into the lesson, I’m standing next to my wife in a room that used to be a dry cleaner’s, except none of it is real. There’s no dry cleaner. There are no photographs on the wall behind us, no five generations of somebody else’s family, no great-great-great-grandfather who started the business. Phyllis Katz put us there with eleven words. A married couple. He’s getting the business in the divorce. Go. The Family That Never Existed Kymberlee started naming them. Her mother. An aunt who sewed buttons. A great-great-great-grandfather who was, she decided on the spot, the queen’s tailor. Each name landed as it had always been there. I stood in the middle of a family that had existed for maybe four seconds, feeling something I did not expect to feel at seventy-three, in a room I’d paid to be humbled in on my birthday. I felt small, and not because Kymberlee was funnier than me in that moment, though she was. The more names she gave to that lineage, the more real it got, and the more real it got, the more I understood that my character had married into something enormous and had brought nothing to it. No trade, no history, just a man who’d noticed she was staying in a business she didn’t want, staying because leaving felt like disappointing relatives who were already gone. I told her that in the scene. I told her the thing she actually wanted was the music, the guitar she wouldn’t put down, and that I’d left, eventually, because she never did. The Actual Assignment Is Silence The gift itself was simple. My birthday landed this week, and Kymberlee arranged two hours alone with Phyllis Katz, a founding member and former director of the Groundlings, one of the people who helped build the school itself, decades in television, film, and stage, still teaching, still sharp enough to stop you mid-sentence. Two of the six people in our improv group were there too, Harnoor Lai and Louis John. Our regular coach is Navaris Dawson, Thursday nights over Zoom, here in Santa Barbara. Phyllis subs when he can’t make it, which means a founding member of the Groundlings is our backup, a fact that’s been ironic on a dozen different levels since the first night we found out. Mostly, what Phyllis gave us that day was silence. Not the kind that happens because nobody has anything to say. The kind you build on purpose and then refuse to fill. Two people up at a time, a relationship, a moment that matters, and one instruction underneath everything else. Find the awkward silences. Do not talk your way past them. I am not good at that. I’ve spent a career, four decades of it, making rooms comfortable, filling the gap before anyone else has to feel it. Phyllis was asking me to do the opposite on purpose, in front of people, for no reason except that the silence was where the scene actually lived. Every instinct I have said, keep talking. She kept saying Stay. Productive Struggle, Mid-Scene So there I was, an invented husband standing in an invented business that belonged to an invented family that was not mine. The actual struggle of the whole two hours had nothing to do with remembering a game or hitting a mark. It was standing still. Letting the moment sit there, ugly and unresolved, instead of rescuing it with a joke or a line or anything at all. I have a word for what that felt like now, one I picked up a few weeks back from a teacher talking about how children learn: productive struggle. I was in it, mid-scene, wanting badly to fill a hole Phyllis needed me to leave open, not knowing yet whether I could. I pushed forward instead of talking. I let the pause sit past the point where every part of me wanted to say something, anything, to make the discomfort stop. Kymberlee let it sit too. And in that stretch of nothing, standing surrounded by five generations of people who had never existed until she named them, something actually happened between us that no line of dialogue would have gotten to faster. None of what happened in that room was real. The two of us, standing in it, were completely real. That’s the difference between listening and waiting for your turn to talk. Later, working with Harnoor, Phyllis said something I wrote down without meaning to. His character already had the answer, she told him. He just had to stop getting in its way. Once you actually know who you’re playing, the character thinks of it. You don’t have to. It gets fast enough that it starts moving on its own, and that speed isn’t a trick. It’s just enough time inside the thing that your own thinking finally gets out of the way and lets the truth through. I recognized what she was describing. It’s the same reason I could stay inside a silence by the fourth scene without bailing the way I’d wanted to on the first. Fluid and authentic turned out to be the same word, arriving late, after enough of it that I stopped deciding what to say and started actually being there. None of It Was Real, All of It Was Real Here’s the part I keep turning over since. None of what happened in that room was real. The photographs weren’t real. The dry cleaning business wasn’t real. The great-great-great-grandfather was invented on the spot by a woman who had never met him, because he doesn’t exist. We built the whole thing out of nothing but the words we chose to say to each other. But the two of us, standing in it, were completely real. What passed between us in that silence, the discomfort, the decision not to fill it, the actual attention we were paying each other instead of waiting for our turn to talk, that part wasn’t pretend. That part is the same skill whether the room is invented or not. It’s the difference between listening to someone and waiting for the gap where you get to speak next. Most conversations I’ve had in my life, the good ones and the forgettable ones both, come down to which one of those two things I was actually doing. I’ve run companies. I’ve produced over a hundred TEDx talks from the wings of a stage in Santa Barbara. I’ve built systems meant to help other people say what they mean. None of that taught me to sit in a silence I’d built with someone else and let it stay uncomfortable until it turned into something true. Phyllis Katz taught me that, at seventy-three, standing in a fake dry cleaner’s, surrounded by a family that was never mine, on the one night of the year built entirely around the fact that I was born. The Pause I’m Supposed to Keep Kymberlee teaches her speaking clients something she calls the Power of the Pause, a breath, a beat, room enough for what was just said to land. What Phyllis had us do was the same thing stretched longer and left raw, uncomfortable on purpose, never rescued. I don’t know yet what I’ll do with it away from the stage. I know the silence is still there, the next time someone I love is talking and I’m already deciding what I’ll say back. Listen to None of It Was Mine on Suno: https://suno.com/s/seXowXziIKjJryR2 Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe

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