Those Little Cat Feet

Six weeks ago I started this, the first of my blogs on blogspot. Like Shiva, I had been creating and destroying blogs for years. Before that, going back to the 1970s when I still lived in the Philippines, I wrote journals in steno notebooks that I still have. (Amazing! 30 years of this!) Blogger was the first time I wrote on a publicly searchable format, an advance that mirrors many of the other endeavors that I have now undertaken.

This blog started when I became disheartened with using iWeb because Apple had trouble creating its new web-hosting service. That launched my move to searching for another way to post my photo images on the Internet and led me to duendearts.smugmug.com. Smugmug.com is a better venue than anything I knew of before moving through the fog on little cat feet!

The Pursuit of Duende is the record of my search for excellence in my life, not just in terms of photographs and what art there is in what I do, but in how I live life itself. Today's post is a point-in-time summation. How does my life, maybe life for everyone, unfold? Wherefore comes its happy accidents and creative moments? 

I said it: accidents.  What turns out is a mix of what we determine to pursue and what comes our way as unpredictable circumstance. So much is made of human will and intentionality, be this in Judeo-Christian, Muslim or Buddhist framework of belief. Certainly what we will shapes much of what happens in our lives. Will gives "shape" to what happens but most of the details in that shape arises from somewhere else, what most civilized people in the world today call God.

As I look back from the vantage of someone who has been analyzing the events of his own life the past 9 months, I see the interplay of these two forces, will and circumstance. Often I decide to do something because of a feeling that I don't even acknowledge to myself. I justify the decisions by cloaking them in the raiment of reason or some other more elevated bias. Regardless of the inciting motive, the result more often than not leads me somewhere both strange and exciting, leads me where I realize I do want to be just didn't know about it before I got here!

I decided on taking a year-long sabbatical in April after trying out three months of it and finding on my return to clinic work that I didn't want to be there. This process actually started a year ago when I started planning to take time off from clinical work. I took a short break from clinical work earlier in 2007 to attend NAB. That first break taught me a break was doable. The December break was not productive of the results I thought I wanted to accomplish. This was because in truth I was acting on a motive that had been lurking in back of my mind since the late 1960s!

As the fourth month of my third break comes to an end, I find myself at a place almost wholly different from where I imagined I would be last December. For years I dreamt of "retiring" from clinical practice but just didn't think I had the financial resources to do it. "Retiring" is a different animal to me now than it has ever looked like in the past. It is not only doable but may even already be here!

Retiring is no longer the retreat I felt it was. It is more like a surge into a future that I had missed creating my previous years. A friend, appropriately called Castor, recently wrote me that he admired me because I was doing what I wanted to do in life. Someone outside my mind sometimes reads it better than I. Retiring is doing what I want to do and having somehow the resources to do this amazes beyond belief.

What I am doing now is not only a shift in activities but in patterns of doing. Years ago when I came across stories of the Chinese gentlemen hermits who opt out of society to live alone in inaccessible places where their lives became simple because they eliminated responsibilities and constraints that they determined were spinning-the-wheel useless the idea was born to live a contemplative life that included only what was bare-bones necessary and desirable. How many people can say they have done this? For most it is not what they want. Commerce with the world at large so obfuscates the issues. The "world" is too seductive.

In the Samyutta Nikaya, Mara, the Buddhist personification of Evil, addresses the Buddha: " To me belong the eye, all bodily forms, the field of vision... To me belong the ear, the sounds, the field of audition.. To me belong the nose... the tongue... the body... the mind, the conditions of mind, the field of mind cognition."

Mara actually is the ancient Indian god of death but he also represents our lust for life, the power of transitory things that somehow we unenlightened humans slavishly pursue. But like the solar year, our lives too have seasons. The Hindu system described this perhaps better than any other. We move from being students of life to being householders (pursuing a livelihood, raising a family) to pursuing wisdom and finally to slowing down to the cadences of nature and timelessness.

A man's life feels long at times but when summarized is such a short span of time. Mind occupies no space hence gives the sense of timelessness. We journey in a split second from childhood to our imagined death.

In his saga, Ultimate Journey, Richard Bernstein, New York Times book reviewer, wrote: "Most of us middle-aged men are among that species of routinized, rationalized beings that Max Weber called 'specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.' We start out idealists and we end up creatures of habit, more concerned about the state of the lawn than of the spirit. Yes, we say to ourselves, it would be nice to break away for a while, but who would walk the dog?" Truer words I have not read.

Duende When It Comes

Duende when it comes permeates everything. I woke up at 2:15 this morning and could not go back to sleep. I took a fourth of a tablet of Diazepam from a prescription I've had for ten years. It worked. After watching an hour of Wild China on Blu-Ray, I felt sleepy, turned off the set and woke up as bushy-tailed as I've ever felt! 

The whole of the day followed like olive oil dripping on fresh, red-leaf lettuce leaf. I found two new models on the web and offered them a shoot. I have not done a photo shoot with models in five weeks. I miss the adrenaline rush.

At the same time I am not desperate to do a model shoot. I am still working on my Internet venues for presenting my work. Smugmug.com has worked out well. I am now referring prospective clients to the site instead of to my duendearts.com site. I did set up a download site on iPhoto for Joe and called him on his cellphone yesterday to let him know. I took the plunge and bought a pro membership on Flickr. I started a new blog specific to photography on blogspot. I still have to get to Facebook, Twitter, and other social network sites, my strategy being to lure visitors to my Internet venue through Web 2.0.

I am rethinking what to offer models for shooting with me in the future. Up to now I have been overly generous providing them with up to fifty digital images. I have to start thinking about licensing rights and the future of my work. I feel my photography career has moved on to the Chapter 2.

I have also switched to Photoshop for processing the images. Aperture is easier in many ways. The straighten tool, for instance, is way easier in Aperture. I can see the immediate effect of every rotation I make. In Photoshop I have to deal with angle of rotation! But Photoshop offers a far better way to adjust white balance. White balance may not be as much of an issue if I set my camera's white balance and type of lighting. The negative of doing that is having to remember to reset the camera when I change shoot venue which I often do in the course of a photo shoot. Half a dozen of sardines, and six anchovies.

Workout at noon was great. I really like taking this break at noon. I do a quick aerobic walk/jog on the catwalk then do weights. I have not done weights in a decade or more! The routine is taking root. I have been doing weights now for almost two weeks. I like the way the muscles feel. At night sometimes they ache but surprisingly I don't ache in the morning. The body is such a forgiving animal.

Back home I spent an hour and a half preparing lunch, reading Bernstein's Ultimate Journey while consuming that, then fixing chicken breast for lunch tomorrow. Already I am missing summer. In the summer I have these wonderful herbs on the deck just steps away, and fresh garden vegetables are available at the store. A few chopped rosemary needles in olive oil is magic toasted on focaccia slices! Right now I am in love with acorn squash. Squash all by itself makes a wonderful thickener for a stew as the photo here shows. It is also rich in vitamin A like all red, yellow and purple vegetables and fruits. 

I boned the chicken breast halves, marinated the meat in vermouth, fresh lime juice, extra virgin olive oil, freshly ground pink and red peppercorns, and crushed garlic. The bones I am simmering with tarragon leaves, fresh thyme, celery, bay leaf, a carrot, and the white part of green onions. I don't know yet what to do with the broth. We'll see.

For the life of me I want to discover if there is something I can identify that brings about a duende-permeated day. Certainly last night did not augur such a day. It could in fact have resulted in a disastrous morning. Maybe duende is as mysterious as others say it is. Just enjoy it when it comes.

Necessary Journey

When I left my position at CMHS at the end of June 2000, I was going to find a new career. I resumed the networking interviews I learned from Mike Kenney in 1985 to research what I would best be suited to do. Among my favorites: develop a nature travel/spiritual quest company to ferry Americans to the Philippines and take a six-month ESL accreditation course in Prague and travel the world teaching English as a Second Language.

My friend, Aldo, told me they could use another psychiatrist at a private clinic in Lafayette. Less than a month after leaving CMHS I was working as a psychiatrist again. I thought I'd do that just until I found what I really wanted to do. I stayed there for 7 1/2 years, half the time I was at CMHS, equal to the time I spent at my first position at the state hospital! Technically I am on sabbatical from the clinic and shall be returning sometime in March next year. I doubt I would though. The longer I do what I am doing now the more likely I would not go back.

My only "artistic" experience was drawing scenes from church rituals as a child in La Paz. I did that for a few months. In high school I discovered I could get respect by studying harder than anybody else and going to the top of the class. That ushered in the next forty years of my life. It was a good time. I learned a lot about myself and the world but there was always the feeling that somehow this was not what I really wanted to do.

I remember I had a cheap Kodak Instamatic camera when I came to America in 1975. Photography then was something one did when family or friends came to town. My first SLR with changeable lenses, a Minolta, revolutionized what I could do with photographs. For the next several years as my sister and I traveled and explored various sites on the continguous 48 states, I took photographs of buildings, building decorative details, close-ups of flowers, mountains and historical sites. I printed my photographs and mounted them on a dozen or more albums. On a trip to Niagara Falls I left the AF SLR camera at a restaurant.  With the older model of the Minolta which was harder to use, I lost my interest in photographs. Besides my closet was full of photograph albums that I didn't know what to do with.

A digital Sony camera changed my experience with photographs. The 2 MB images were amazing especially when I found out that by moving the camera very slightly I could take great pictures by manipulating the direction of the reflected light. I was hooked. I took the camera with its video-capability on my second trip back to the Philippines, this time with my older sister, Merma. I still have those tiny images but back then nobody else had a digital camera so what I was able to do stunned everyone else. Nowadays, of course, everybody and his brother carries some kind of digital image capture device and increasingly people take pictures with their cellphones. Back during the time of my Sony digital camera, this scenario was unthinkable!

I started using Apple computers in 1985. As the computer became focused on desktop publishing and then on digital media I was swept along in the digital revolution. I bought Final Cut Pro long before people even thought they could make decent videos at home. My old Canon took miserable videos (although the sound quality was pretty good even then). The next turning point for me was when I attended and earned Apple accreditation in video editing after attending a week-long seminar in NYC two years ago. I was more ambitious than I should be. The media were all touting the ease with which ordinary people could make "independent movies."

Last year I attended the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas. That was another turning point for me. I didn't know that kind of excitement from attending psychiatric conferences all those many other years! I took seminars mostly in video editing and production but back in Indiana I dreamt more than I did any real work. My hard drives are full of projects I initiated but didn't pick up again after the first day or two.

I attended NAB again last April. This time, without intending to, I gravitated towards the hands-on seminars on shooting video, the use of studio lights, working with "talent," even make-up. That brought me closer to actually shooting videos. A month after coming back from Las Vegas I shot my first model, Kaleb. He was such a wonderful model that an hour into the shoot, while I lay uncomfortably on the floor so I could shoot up to his torso and face, I realized I was enjoying myself as I had not enjoyed myself ever!

Since then I have shot eight more models. Two, Arron and Scott, helped me learn how to shoot not only in the studio but outdoors in sunlight. The next turning point came when I accompanied Arron to his modeling school. The school owner commented how my photo images were not good enough. They did not look professional. Of course, they did not. They were too yellow! In an instant I grasped that I needed to work on white balance which at the time, a month ago, was a huge mystery to me.

I came back home that evening and used the white balance adjustment on Aperture with results that stunned me. I didn't know the software could do that. I didn't know my images could look as good as they do when the color balance was shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum. I had liked the tanned look on the models but they were too "tanned" and I didn't even know it until Karen pointed it out.

I don't know when I first bought Adobe products. I think I started with Photoshop and gradually through Adobe promotional sales I found myself owning the CS3 web design suite earlier this year. To tell the truth though I had not taken the time to learn the programs. Back then it was enough that I had them. Someday, I told myself, I would learn to use them. In fact this was what I told myself to justify going on a sabbatical late last December. I was going to be gone only until March but when I returned to clinical work very quickly I realized that was not what I wanted to do anymore.

Aperture has been great but in the last few days I have been discovering why photographers have been in raptures over Photoshop. With just a few mouse clicks, my collection of over 120,000 images look like they have never looked before. My studio shots particularly were revealed in their glory!

There is so much to learn. I tell myself that what I am doing is equivalent to going back to a four-year college. This is so entirely different from what I've done before. Over the years I've learned a smattering of computer language without really understanding the terms I was using. I knew of the software programs without really knowing how to use them. One day at a time I am learning that shortcuts are just not good enough. I have to get down to my knees in the mud and learn the programs from the ground up.

Meanwhile I have to continue putting out work that other people can access. Finding smugmug.com was another turning point for me. Here was a vehicle for putting my work up for sale in an elegant presentation without me having to reinvent the wheel. Despite my resistance I am learning mark-up language although I don't see myself becoming a master in XHTML. My passion is in generating portraits and images of people.

I don't know where this odyssey will lead me. In the last four months I feel I have learned so much that I could say I have made a career switch. I have moreover learned more in the past month than I learned in two years before May of this year. It's been a journey, and one that increasingly is becoming a necessary one for me to take. 

The problem of taking one step after another in one direction is that after a while we realize our path in life has changed. We could, of course, retrace our steps back to where we started but we could never go back home, Thomas Wolfe. We make the path by walking.

The Gold in Our Lives

Sometimes in the evening, after coming home from the gym, I would eat my evening meal on the dining room table and watch whatever portion of the Olympic games was being aired by NBC. The picture is blurry–I don't have cable–but gives a better approximation of what is going on the other side of the globe than my imagination ever can.

The NBC commentators would bring out the stories of the participants to show what a struggle it has been for them to get to come to the world's premier competitive athletic meet. Yesterday, at the women's marathon, the focus was on British world record holder, Paula Radcliffe, who ran despite pain caused by a stress fracture of her thigh. The stories are meant to inspire the viewers with their stories of hardship.

What is it that pushes men and women to aspire for an Olympic gold? Michael Phelps reported won a million dollars just in sponsorship bonuses by winning his eighth medal. There is money, there is wealth; there is the adulation of one's countrymen and women; there is fame, recognition, even validation for the man or woman who in his or her heart of hearts may have hungered for this all their life.

In Jeff Dunas' 2003 collection of photographs of stars and other newsmakers, Up Close and Personal, his subjects described what it was like to be media heroes in this age of media heroism. Cameron Diaz whom the photographer apparently "discovered" spoke about "an energy, an essence" that stars possess, something intangible that other artists like a photographer is able to capture on media. She believed the artist attempting to capture that essence has himself or herself also have to possess that certain energy. Dunas in his foreword asked: "What is it about them that draws us in, entertains us and allows us to use them as substitutes for ourselves in our fantasy lives?" His question suggests a psychological function that stars and heroes fulfill in our individual lives.

I think stars and heroes do have certain energies that contributed to their becoming the energy magnets that they are but I don't think they generate the energy by themselves. Stars are people like you and me. Those who see them in the various media at our disposal, for entertainment or inspiration, infuse them with the energy that makes them the stars that they are for however long their energy synchs with that of their viewers and idolizers.

I have posted email to a 20-year-old Filipino photographer whose images have impressed me. He has vision and his work shows the confidence he has in his vision. Without that confidence we don't express ourselves and if we don't express ourselves we can't share what lives in the private spaces of our fantasies or imagination. We need to share our creative energy, our star essence, to partake of the chemistry that happens when author, media and viewer or consumer come together. 

Vision comes before beauty. Our confidence in our vision makes us put it out there and it is then up to the world of alchemy to transform it, if the other creative energies it comes in contact with it are present, into stars, into things of beauty, into objects that inspire procreative fire.

Meanwhile there is the struggle day in and day out to master our insecurity and force ourselves to walk the path of the stars. For me recently this has been to learn to use Photoshop because what little I know of the program has allowed me to reconfigure photo images like this one of Lenny into visions I almost don't recognize as mine!

Putting Our Hands Together

Mornings have turned cool. In direct sunshine though the heat unequivocally says it is summer still!

I took a break yesterday from working on images. I finished reading Albert von Le Coq's 1928 book, Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan. This was his account of finding Buddhist, Manichaeian and Nestorian Christian artifacts in the abandoned cities of what used to be Chinese or Eastern Turkestan. He posited that what is now Xinchiang in China was once inhabited by Indo-European peoples. East and West met here.

Growing up in the Philippines and migrating to America halfway through with my life I straddle the East-West divide. I am intrigued by culture and how culture shapes the way we see and live life. Dividing the world into East and West is a convenient way to study cultures. The land mass we call Europe on the West and Asia on the East intrigues me as the boundary between East and West shifted through the centuries.

Last night, my interest in the Central Asia shifted to the Himalayas that bounded it on the south and watched Eric Valli's movie, Himalaya. Half documentary, half fiction, the movie kept my attention for all 104 minutes. It documents the culture of the Dolpopa, a small village in the Nepalese Himalayas, the struggle between the old and young generations, and between the influx of Western technology and old-time religion.

My interest in history and culture is more influential, certainly more established than my interest in art and photography. When I started visiting the Philippines again in the 1980s I hatched plans for documenting the changing culture there. I wanted to unearth what I knew of life in the islands when I was growing up and tracing its connections to the history of the rest of the world. 

In connecting Philippine culture and history to the rest of the world maybe I am attempting to find my own place in the world. Here is passion that I have not really put at the center of my search for what to do with the rest of my life. I doubt I have the boldness and vision of Valli who made his movie after encountering Tibetan culture in his travels to Central Asia. But how do I marry my interests with what I do? How do I put my hands together and connect the forces of the left with that of the right? Where do I find where the forces in my life can come together to make a significant contribution to our knowledge of ourselves and how best to live our lives?

A Life of Its Own

My last photo shoot was on July 18. I have not done any shoots since then. The past month has been a time for rethinking my goals in photography.

July 18 was the day Apple began its switch from .mac to me.com. The next few days I battled the changes when my iWeb site refused to update. The problems with the website forced me to try my other options. I tried uploading it to duendearts.com. That didn't work. iWeb just was not designed to work with other hosting servers. I checked out other commercial hosting sites and in the process looked at photographs that other, non-established photographers were posting. I began to doubt the wisdom of my path. These other photographers on the whole seemed to be more accomplished than I.

Accompanying Arron to John Robert Powers took me the next step. From listening to the school owner I realized I could alter the skin tones on my photographs by using white balance. The world of color correction opened.

The last two weeks I have been studying smugmug.com, how to build a site there and their recommendations for making photographic images produce good prints. Equipped with more knowledge about color levels, color curves, sRGB and color spaces, I think I am ready to move on.

Yesterday I processed images for the first time since doing Abby's shoot. I worked on the pool shots of Arron and Scott. That outdoor photo shoot with two models was another critical point for me. Shooting the guys at the pool gave me a reverse deja vu. This was what professional fashion shooting felt like. I loved it!

Today I am going to try to finish processing Arron and Scott's photos, finish one or two galleries on smugmug.com, and read the manual on the Canon D5 and Pixma 9000 Pro. My agenda has been filling up again. I want to experiment with printing photos at home, printing on CDs and DVDs, and complete my equipment purchases before the end of the month.

The future remains uncertain. I don't know if I can make money from photography and videos but I'll go it one step at a time. Find your bliss, Joe Campbell used to advise his students. Marcia Sinetar's advise was the same: find what you enjoy doing and the money will follow. I have always been cavalier about earning money. I doubt this will change. Feeling creative and growing by learning and experience have been more important to me.

Meanwhile the summer is winding down. The days have gotten cooler in the morning although the sun is intense when it rises above the trees and hits you straight on. The garden is a mess but there are late-season bloomers. The garage and my bedroom are crammed full. I have a mess of things I want to do.

I decided not to fly to Kansas tomorrow. Merma was shocked when I called her this morning but by now she knows I can change my mind like this. I've done it before. I bought the ticket at a time when I was feeling down about the whole photography enterprise.

When all is said and done, life is a cycle of ups and downs. How we feel affects out decisions in the moment but in the long run life has a life of its own. It's integrity stems from something bigger than our moment's lapses.

Our Unique Journey

Making one's way in life is often making it in the fog. We can't see what comes next; all we have to help us set our direction is what already we have seen and what we are seeing now.

From what we have seen of life we gather together our bearings. These consist of what we believe are patterns of action and consequence. When you see bird flocks fly across the sky, you know winter is coming. 

I have not gone over the photos I took on the trip to the Amalfi Coast last May. I've processed a few photos when browsing the folders in Aperture but I have not gone through every image. Most of what I've seen are forgettable images. They are more useful for recapturing the adventure but as art they fail miserably.

While taking the photographs I believed I was capturing something of what I was experiencing at the time. The images bring back the experience but without my memories the images themselves don't tell anything of the story. An artistic image is a moment plucked from the story line that somehow communicates a story, not always the same story, just by itself. When I put several photos together, the story emerges so maybe as a collection the images could work.

Yesterday I viewed two mini DV tapes on the new Sony field player. I found the interview with Sean about his views on women and relationships with women as moving as ever. I remember showing it to Francisco who commented on how frank Sean was in his answers. "What is woman?" I started out asking him. As though talking to himself he gave answers that seemed to come unedited directly from inside him. There was no acting here. Good actors could perhaps mimic this directness but that shoot made me want to make movies about real people but real people who are able to reveal their souls as openly as Sean did. 

I think a model or actor is good when he projects what the viewer feels are his private, intimate self. Intimacy touches us. In the course of our business or family lives there remains a part of us that is like a wound. During the day's busy with chores and external challenges we might forget we have this wound but at night or when we are finally alone with our own thoughts the wound reappears. Some of us have completely forgotten thee wounds until something touches that soothes the burning, aching pain of the wound. Then we remember that the wound has never stopped hurting; we just learned to put it away in our secret room. 

A relationship might staunch the pain for a while but the wound does not go away forever. The wound is our very soul. When we recognize it is our wound and decide to do something about it, we take risks that could make the dull ache sharp and more intense. Sometimes we feel better despite the greater pain. There is no question then in our minds about the wound's presence. Pain brings clarity and we prefer clarity to ignorance.

I want to create works to make us remember the primeval wounds our souls are. Fiction in words and/or images might be too big for me to tackle. I must find venues more suited to my resources. To find what only I uniquely can do is not settling for something smaller. Wounds are metaphysical realities, unlimited by the usual measures by which we judge everything else. 

To know my own wound and from that wound seek to connect other people to their own wounds is essential work. For me this is what spiritual has come to. This has nothing to do with gods or beliefs and everything to do with living above all the posturing drama and heedless craving.

Between Valley and Mountain Top

All through the night I dreamt how I would change the way I used the camera and what kind of photography I would be doing. Dreams don't augur the future; they reflect our current concerns.

I canceled the photo shoot this morning with Angelina. It was the first shoot that I scheduled since the new Canon D5 arrived. Yesterday when I called the model to cancel I just didn't feel I could do the shoot justice. I felt I needed to rethink what I wanted to do before proceeding.

The trip to John Robert Powers last week (only last week? It feels longer ago than that!) made me stop to rethink where I was going with photography. Shooting Kaleb in May undoubtedly was an eye-opener. I had not enjoyed myself like that ever before! Since then I've shot eight other people. My shoots with Arron, Scott and Lenny repeated the kind of excitement I felt with Kaleb. The shoots generated photos that were good, especially now that I know to use white-balance adjustment. 

I have learned a lot since that first shoot in May but good is not good enough. More to the point: what do I really want to do with photographs? 

To get beyond just good I need to do more than what I am doing. I have to push myself into doing spectacular work. I should probably work with a successful advertising, portrait or commercial photographer to learn the trade at closer range. Or I should learn the technology of digital photography better. Instead of shooting on the fly I should plan shoots more carefully. I should work on concept. Moviemaking requires a good script. In photography, concept is the equivalent of a script. I can always learn more from simply photographing people but I need to be clearer in my mind what it is I want to accomplish. From an overall vision I should then create individual projects.

Projects come from one's vision but are most successful when harnessed to a real-life demand. Watching last night the BBC's  2007 two-part documentary of Russian music and culture icon, Tchaikovsky, dramatized for me the marriage between personal and public circumstances. Tchaikovsky as a child complained of intrusive musical ideas. It was a driving force in his life. He gamely went along with family and societal dictates and schooled himself to be a Czarist civil servant but a few months doing this was enough. He quit and devoted himself to making a career as a composer.

His homosexuality was another driving force for Tchaikovsky. His music became his one outlet for the conflict his sexuality caused in his life. He longed for the security of a married heterosexual man and the conflict drove him to write the passionate, romantic music that he may not have written had he been what he wished he was.

What is my passion? How do I channel my own conflicts, those issues with which I have done battle all my life, into creativity?

Photography was not uppermost in my mind when I decided to take a sabbatical from clinical work last December. I wanted to get out of a career that I had spent 40 years of my life when I really did not like what I was doing. But where to go was the question. The sabbatical was going to help me find the answer to that one question. Is photography the answer?

Every morning, before I do anything else, I write. Images are an acquired passion. Writing, too, is something I learned to do. Fueling both is my true passion: examining life experience and attempting to understand it. But examining is itself meaningless unless I put the insights into a form that not only communicates them but allows the viewer or reader to experience the insights for themselves.

Insights speak to the intellectual aspect of passion. Intellect is perhaps best depicted by culture and at the heart of culture are two modes of expression: ideas and images. Philosophy is the mountain top of one, art of the other. Both require a crystalline intelligence, the best that a man or woman could hope to cultivate in the course of a lifetime.

And how is this intelligence best expressed? In our lives. The circle is complete.

Looking Great Togetherr

There are so many things to do but days too when the energy to do them is low. I have always struggled with giving myself a break. After nearly sixty-two years, I am still struggling!

I think we learn to struggle early  on in life. God knows, maybe struggling is in our genes. We are born with it. Trying to unlearn struggling is herculean. Who knows but it may not be possible. Maybe it has a place in the world.

While our lives often feel like one continuous struggle (Buddhist call this dukkha), success comes like punctuation marks, often unrelated to the struggle. Oh, suffering sometimes reaches an intensity when we try harder and what we seek comes about. Even then, what happens is a result of conditions only one of which is our struggling harder. Most of these conditions stem from all kinds of points outside us. 

We live such insular lives because our minds make us the center of everything happening around us. We call this "experience." To everyone, his or her experience is at the center of the known universe. We live in a sea of centers, each one believing his or her center to be the true center of it all. Copernicus' insight that got Galileo in trouble with the Catholic Church was a pivotal insight in the course of human evolution because for the first time human beings recognized that they were not the center of all creation.

Like the center in which we see ourselves, happiness too seems a creation of the mind. I took a sabbatical from clinical work to free myself of external constraints. I love working alone but external constraints now fewer have become occasions for greater creativity. Tony is coming for lunch. His visit is like a punctuation mark in my daily routines. Punctuation marks not only indicate pauses or stops; the marks themselves call attention to the sentence, the paragraph, the entire written work we are reading.

Suffering is like that, too. We don't like it when it comes but many times it is when we take unusual effort to make something happen and that is enough to push the other conditions into realizing what we desire.

Perfection, too, like happiness is like this. We grow to believe we know what is right and true. It's the same delusion as the idea we are the center of all happenings in the universe. Everyone is like me. Everyone speaks from his or her experience and thinks it as gospel truth. Everyone is an expert. Media—newspapers, books, the Internet, colleges, churches—they all are experts preaching to us about gospel truth. After a while groups of people begin to think the world is as it is preached. We form cliques, communities, peoples, and nations.

Beauty belongs to the same category of delusion. Each culture has its own set of ideas, including ideas of perfection, of beauty. In a global age when cultures converse with each other more readily ideas come together creating monolithic structures. No matter how big and singular they become, ideas are no more true than what one person believes.

Suffering punctuates our lives if we are lucky. (If we are not, the whole of our life feels like suffering with no beginning or end.) It has a place in the world after all. All are conditions that come together in various ways, like a salad or a fruit cocktail.

I took this photo this morning without setting up the lighting correctly. I forced the camera to shoot. The resolution is poor but I like the combination of orange and blue. Like colors complementing each other because they are opposites, life's various conditions unbalance and balance in an endless cycle that defies comprehension. We take note of what is coming together or falling apart: punctuation. 

Struggle punctuates our lives. We should be so lucky to have it!

One Turn Two Many

Going to John Robert Powers with Arron twice this week felt like a milestone equal in significance to shooting my first model last May.

After reading up on modeling, going to a live audition and going in with Arron to talk to the school owner, Karen, added reality to what had been till then an abstract topic.

Arron was invited to an audition by Karen, the school owner. He asked me to go with him. Some 80 people were gathered in the room that I later found out was one of the classrooms where aspiring models and/or actors met for classes. The afternoon started out with a high-energy introduction by Amy who introduced Karen as "the" national talent scout for JRP. Karen gave an even more high-energy presentation, cramming her statements with information that frankly was impressive. I went in with Arron for his first interview with her. He was dejected when we left because he didn't have the $1950 needed to pay for a ten-week course of classes. When he learned the following day that the school selected him, "one of the 3%" of some 300 people that Karen interviewed for the current class term, he became more determined to find the money. While attending classes (which turned out to be for acting in commercials, something Arron was not so keen about), students are eligible to attend the auditions held "one to three times a month" with casting directors, talent agents and/or talent managers that the national office has screened to audition JRP students. It sounded like a good deal.

Arron again invited me to go with him on Wednesday when he met with Karen to discuss the program details. By this time he had taken out an additional sum from his car loan and planned to use part of his student loan to pay for the classes. His mind was made up.

The two encounters with the modeling school (because that's what JRP basically is) left me with largely positive energy. Now, days later, I look back on the whole shindig and see it with more objectivity. I still think it is basically a good deal for one who has the determination, personality and looks to be a model or commercial actor. I also see how well-designed the presentation was which was I think largely a sales pitch to sign up students. Just like with most other, maybe all other businesses, financial success is at the heart of the presentation and I think the presentation was highly effective. But I also see the showmanship involved and how there is not much sincerity involved. One could scarcely expect sincerity with strangers. Sincerity and genuineness could evolve when people got to know each other. This is probably par for businesses. We act and speak in such a way as to obtain our business objectives.

Seeing the show deflated my enthusiasm for model work. Talking to Tony this morning I rehashed my perception of the meetings when he surprised me by asking. At this point in life, I can recognize showmanship and the trappings that people utilize to incite desire or intimidation. I was taken in completely initially but the more time passes I see the mundane structure on which business magic is performed.

Photography as a business is magic performed on mundane structures. The magic, no matter that it is glitter and superficial panache, is still magic. There is religious magic that most people hold is such awe they can't even consider looking it in the eye. Patriotism is another category of magic as children and the sanctity of human life. Magic plays on our most powerful emotions and as humans we share similar emotions across cultural boundaries.

My attitude changed after lunch today and read Lesko's book on fashion and advertising photography. If there is little sincerity in the magic we have to generate to be successful in business, it is the same magic that transforms people's lives in what we call art or culture. Art is about creating magic. I can admire it even in its business form. Artists might scoff at commerce and money but earning money and becoming a successful business are in themselves vehicles to feel that same magic. 

Magic is simply an interpretation of events that gives it special meaning, meaning that accesses feelings too complex to analyze. When we analyze magic we see how common it is but letting ourselves go we can enjoy it. I doubt human beings can rid themselves of our habitual need for meaning and seeking it in pedestrian events. If we must have meaning in our lives, why not meaning that helps us accomplish acts we would ordinarily not even attempt to accomplish?

Making Art of Curiosities

I stopped work to get lunch ready so I could watch the Charlie Rose Show. I always find his conversations with his guests informative, sometimes even inspiring. Today his guest was Barbara Walters whose memoir, Auditions, was published last May.

The show paired two people whom I enjoy for primarily the same reason. They talk to people to bring out their stories, what motivated them and the choices they made, the influences that shaped these, how they perceive themselves, and how they assess their lives. 

In today's conversation with Rose, Walters said the one personal feature that made her good at what she did and also made her enjoy what she did was curiosity. This interest in things—what they are, how they come about, what value or use they have, what role they play in how our cards play out in life—is what I usually call energy. It is in Buddhism one of the factors of enlightenment. With interest one pays attention; with attention one learns and accomplishes things.

Ideas and people's lives fascinate me. Being able to nourish and multiply the energy of this fascination and being able to capture the process such that I can share them with others: these are what I want at the core of how I live out the rest of my life. 

My life has taken a different route but I can identify with many of Barbara's perceptions about hers. She spoke of her childhood and the influence on her and her subsequent life of her sister and her parents. Our relationship with our parents lies at the center or near the center of how we see ourselves and the choices we make that create our lives.

And then we have the personality characteristics and our drives. Walters didn't envision herself becoming a major media personality and celebrity. She named her one great skill the skill of seeing what is important and how best to communicate this. She called this editing.

Editing is specialized decision-making. We choose from several ways to go. Each choice narrows the possibilities while taking us deeper into the specialized experience and skills that those choices give us.

Charlie Rose's conversation with Walters this afternoon and Eytan Fox's movie Walking on Water that I re-watched last night: what do they have in common? Both commandeered my interest completely. They riveted my attention as surely as nails fixed Jesus on his cross. Watching and listening, my mind stopped evaluating itself and applied what was usually self-centered and infertile to something "out" there where the kind of creativity I want can exist.

Barbara described herself as an introvert before she went in front of the TV camera. Her insecurities drove her to work harder and to take advantage of what chance lay across her path. She did not stop at self-scrutiny. She applied what she knew of the process to elicit the spectacular interviews that lay at the heart of her success. She used her most private resources in her public life. This is energy of a different sort. This is how I want to use energy.

I can dissect my story and the stories I hear about other people. I've done this a lot. It's not where I want to take the remaining years of my life. I want to share what I have lived through and what experiences and insights my choices have given me in a manner that makes other people feel the way I did watching Charlie Rose this afternoon or watching the Israeli movie last night. 

It's like the parable of the talents in the Christian gospels. We can keep the energy to ourselves and it doesn't multiply. It is when we risk losing what moves and inspires us by putting it out there that energy really shows what it is really about. 

This is art: our personal curiosities thrust into the public conversation that the energies collide and become fruitful.