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!