The Streets and Neighborhoods of the Mind

After fresh snow blanketed Maine and with sunshine transformed his backyard to an enchanted land, Kyriacos Markides, in his book, Riding with the Lion, wrote : "A day like this made me temporarily oblivious of Cyprus. My incurable longing for the streets and neighborhoods of my youth and the hidden coves where I spearfished with my friends receded for a while to the back of my awareness."

I don't yearn for the streets and landscapes of the Philippines. I am not the patriotic sort. But images that remind me of the Philippines--coconut trees bending towards white, sandy beaches, hibiscus and plumeria blossoms, rice cakes on banana leaves, tiny village churches--delight and bring inexplicable pleasure.

What is the nature of delight in the mind. How do certain images or ideas seem to glow when they enter into the mind stream? What is the experience like? Can this be a phenomenon I could intentionally duplicate? But why only certain images or ideas? Taken together, do these images and ideas amount to something coherent and true about life, about me, about the universe?

For over 20 years, after sitting in meditation I would give dharma talks to those gathered there with me. Bits of ideas do come into the mind as I meditate and I do often identify one idea that is like the string with which I know I could pull the kite out of the wide blue sky. I start with that one idea and soon I am discoursing about Buddhist philosophy and its constructs about personhood and the "world," and I am amazed. Ideas tumble out of my mouth unbidden, often as a much a surprise to me as to my listening friends. I could feel the truthfulness of what I am saying. Thus I would think to myself have other people written extended expositions of prose that have inspired religions. But does the feeling of truthfulness mean these ideas are true?

In his book, Markides recounts how the two saintly mystics he had met back in Cyprus had had a falling apart. Do saints quarrel? Are they not supposed to have ego, pride, or vanity? The history of religions contains numerous examples of how religious leaders, many of them saints revered by their disciples, act in ways we think of as unholy. Even Jesus lost control of his anger and harried the vendors of animal sacrifices out of the temple in Jerusalem. Somehow Christian apologists were able to put his anger into something elevating but we all know how anger means loss of control to our ego. In anger we say harsh and hurting words, and act harshly and meanly.

What is the connection between the felt truthfulness of ideas that come to us in prayer or after meditation and virtue, the way we live our lives? Are the two compatible? Is there truly a person who after entering some doorway into sanctity forevermore acts, thinks and feels holy, kind, generous, compassionate, all the virtues our religions teach us as the way noble humans ought to act?

More to the point, does our feeling that an idea is true founded in truth? I think an artist also finds his art in a similar fashion. How many times does art arise from some mistake? How often do artists create new visions of enchantment after losing their way and finding themselves suddenly in a strange neighborhood where they'd never been?

Finally, what is truth? What is beauty? Are all these simply maya, delusions our minds bring about to soften the impact of a truly meaningless existence where there is no truth, no goal truly worthy of pursuing, no truly saintly or holy person, nothing worth living for? There is just this moment and how we construe it is immaterial?

Shopping the World

I feel guilty when I get lost roving the Internet and checking out the sites that mirror my interests, which are legion! But sailing the ether waves for me is like traveling through security lines, planes, ships, buses and cars. Real time travel might even suffer by comparison for the discomfort it involves!

Visiting other people's websites whets my appetite for creating my own. So far I've finished a third of  David Morris' book on creating a Flash-based site and realizing that by the end of the book I still won't be ready to create my own site. The book only introduces me to what can be done with Flash but not what I want to do.

Nonetheless we dream, I dream, and take one tiny step each day. I have decided not to go back to my lifetime profession and stay instead learning digital imaging and Internet art. I have the time and if I don't produce what I dream of producing the intent is not so much the product as the process. That, I'm afraid, is where I'm at today.

But while quality of life and being able to pursue lifelong dreams at last are increasingly the raison d'être, I don't want to think of myself as a hobbyist. One of these dreams is to learn the business of making money from my interests. For what I do to earn money would indicate a level of mastery that by myself I could not give to my work. Men and women band together not only for the more efficient production of food but, in the modern age, other less material benefits. Money as I learned from Joe Dominguez years ago simply symbolizes effort and time from the finite supply of both that we have. But it is also founded on people willing to use the symbol of what they've earned to acquire what they themselves could not produce but would like to have in their life. Money is desire as much as necessity symbolized in concrete form.

I use the term duende recklessly. I know that in the field of art and intuitive creativity I am a tyro. I look at what others do and I'm humbled, sometimes shamed that I aspire to heights from which they already produce their works. Duende like perfection is a goal, more elevating than death that comes with little effort on our part. It's the effort that makes the aspiration thrilling and worth the ups-and-downs of spirit that taking on the enterprise entails.

Where's the Beef?

In 2007, critics uniformly panned Good Luck Chuck. Critics in 21 reviews gave it an average score of 17 out of 100, indicating "extreme dislike or disgust." Audiences however flocked to the box office making it the #1 opening week blockbuster in both the U.S. and the U.K.

I watched the movie last night with dislike alternating with curiosity. I was disgusted one minute, touched the next. The movie certainly is a mixed-up cocktail. It didn't go down smoothly like the best gin, more like tubá from an unknown street-corner vendor in an unfamiliar Iloilo town.

The movie was based on a short story by Steve Glenn about a thirty-something doctor-wannabe dentist cursed to make every woman he beds fall in love and marry the next guy they meet. The concept sounds like the daytime fantasy of every teenage boy with roiling testosterone levels but surprisingly no one until now has made a movie or novel treatment of it. 

Maybe it's not so surprising after all. The concept is so lowbrow. What can be more disgusting than the teenage male fantasies of female parts taken out of context to feed interminable jerk-off sessions? Civilized people insist we love the person and not just her or his body parts. In our endless attempt to morph our natural instincts to serve our equally ubiquitous yearning for lofty spaces like heaven, society has provided us with a supply of story concepts to mine.

To think outside the box: this is what I think of as creativity. To think outside the box: this is what's missing in my own appreciation of myself. I think and analyze and come up again and again with the same boring mazes that no longer amaze. I feel I'm missing a vital part of myself. Maybe it is the familiar theme of seeking perfection when we are experiencing what Buddhist call dukkha, the intrinsic quality of life that moves from pleasure to disgust as things change. If we didn't have this sense of incompleteness we would have no ambition. Without desire, life is incomprehensible.

I shot Aaron and Scott four times before I got surfeited and stopped processing the images. Last night I came across two folders of images shot by the guys when I gave them a camera to shoot when the other was posing. They took pictures without paying attention to the "rules." Some of the images are really good. I am too much of a law-abider. My images, like my stories, are all hackneyed products of a rational process.

Good art, whether in photography, movies or literary fiction, combines a respectful combination of stereotypes and inventive casting. Creativity is letting go and barging into familiar territories blind to what we know. Fumbling in the dark is uncomfortable but through that discomfort we move to spaces outside of ourselves.

Gathering Up the Sun

Not including April when I closed my cases at Alpine Clinic, I have now been on sabbatical eight months, two-thirds of a year. It's time for a review.

I went over iCal on my desktop to see what I have been doing with the time. It appears I have done very little of what I thought I wanted to use the time for. Three consistent daily activities are meditating as soon as I get dressed, writing while I am having my first cup of coffee, and going to the gym in the evening. 

I did want to go back to meditating on a regular basis. I can't say that regular meditation has affected my lifestyle much. I do the minimum, sometimes as little as five minutes a day, but I do feel my morning incomplete if I don't sit on the cushion for at least that much time.

There have been days when I am inspired again by Buddhism. My dharma talks on Sunday mornings have been superb, often a surprise to me as well. But when I try to sit down and write down what came out of my mouth the inspired thoughts melt into inaccessibility.

Working out at the gym has been my greatest achievement. I lost 10 pounds early on then didn't lose any more. I did progress to walking up to seven miles a day. I rediscovered the pleasure of walking outdoors around the landscaped lake at the Crossing. A month ago I started using weights again, something I had not done in years. The muscles of my upper body are starting to bulk up again but overall my muscle mass has gotten flabby.

For a couple of months I had left-sided chest pain that frightened me. They are gone now. I don't think they were cardiac in origin since they would come at night when I lay down in bed. I would prop myself sideways to view the TV monitor on one side of the room. The experience did bring about a change in my routines. In years past I thought I would prefer to die of cardiac ischemia but I've changed my mind. This has added impetus to my working out, cooking and modifying my eating habits again. Now my worry centers around the floaters in both eyes that appeared after cataract surgery four years ago now.

Going on a springtime walking tour to the Amalfi Coast of Italy last May was a chapter opener. Walking at the gym enabled me to tackle the walking. I didn't do as well as I could have but this does not belittle the accomplishment that trip was for me. It was my first trip to Europe without Merma. It was my first trip on a time of the year I've always wanted to visit Europe, in the spring when spring flowers abound. 

A walking tour affords views of Europe that melted my heart. That is like the intimacy one gets a glimpse of when going to bed with a bar pickup. Tourist haunts are great but seeing a foreign country in those places where only locals live grants pleasure beyond the tourist high. Somewhere in the back of my mind, probably influenced by my readings about ancient Buddhist and Taoist adepts, is the lure of passing my days "like the clouds in the sky."

Writing has been confined to journal, blog entries and email. Since starting the sabbatical I have written blogs, first on the iWeb site I created, now on several blogger sites. I have not written anything close to something I'd want to publish. Writing has been more of a self-indulgence, analyzing what is going on with me (as this blog is doing) or recording ideas or memories that have somehow captured my attention. 

To write for publication, a dream I've had for decades, I have to be more disciplined and organized. Writing for myself is a different animal altogether. To write for public consumption is not the activity I look forward to doing when my eyes first open in the morning and I rouse myself out of bed by visualizing the first thing I would do. Writing for public consumption feels, like the other projects over which I've been dragging my feet, like work!

I write best when writing to someone. Email from Castor has been my inspiration for writing essays about my memories of life in the Philippines and life now in America. Writing with panache does not happen as often now that the energy of first meeting someone has faded. An old Pacific Bridge correspondent, Kody, recently established contact again. My letter to him the other day had elements of writing that I had not seen in a while. I am still "looking for my voice," something I am starting to think is simply another pussyfooting tactic.

Work on digital imaging has not been as consistent. I did start photographing models in April when Kaleb drove up from Bloomington. Shooting him was an eye-opener. I loved shooting an attractive man. It was, frankly, like making love to a fantasy image. Photography makes possible an idealized fantasy. Relationships are too quirky. While I have not completely sworn them off what I've experienced have generally been more of a chore than the fulfillment of a dream.

Dreams, it seems, are fine when sleeping or when we look into the future for what we desire in the present. They give us something to work towards while we continue to take the present, passing moment for granted. Dreams add electricity to the images we conjure when we indulge desires. To live without dreams is a possibility I have not realized.

Meanwhile I find myself moving ineluctably towards old age and death. My letter to Kody was a response to his letter that continued to speak about the loss of his one lifelong relationship, his mother. Going down gently into the night evokes elegiac beauty but in the main I am not ready to go that route. I feel I've paid dues to arrive where I am now when dreams finally can be worked on and turned into concrete realities.

Since starting the sabbatical I've resurrected another activity that had disappeared from my daily routines: cooking. Cooking used to be an art form. It is starting to be that again. Tony, another old Pacific Bridge friend who re-entered my life a couple of years ago now, has taken to coming over for lunch once a week. That's helped inspire me to plan and execute beautiful meals.

Through all this I have been neurotic about measuring the daily surge or lack of creative energy. In clinical terms that I refuse anymore to accept, this is the old "enemy" that was labeled depression. I believe depression is more than just a clinical entity to be addressed with antidepressant chemicals and therapy. It is brain chemistry but at the core of it is something more essential and subject to being altered by modifying my perceptions. 

Desire is critical to dreams. The real task is to extract the way it illumines experience and apply that to moment-to-moment living. Dreams prefigure a reality more dazzling still when we live it now. While I busy myself listing again and again the dreams of a lifetime, the future, just a moment from now, takes its own shape, more amazing than anything I plan. So I'll husband my resources to use the time I've created for these old dreams while recognizing that the reality that comes about is more than what I know myself to be.

Maybe going old is simply rejoining the stream of everything that changes according to a governance we can only intuit but never quite know. We learn to trust, and not judge ourselves and our accomplishments so harshly.

After a Storm

I was working in Flash last night using David Morris' book on how to create a Flash-driven web site when the storm arrived. Hail cluttered against the roof and window while wind and rain lashed the trees outside. Power went out several times. I gave in and called a halt. It was half past eleven.

The storm melted the humidity. This morning the air glittering with sunlight is fresh and cool. 

I spent the morning dealing with finances on the phone, an activity that can be frustrating. I'm glad for the work I did. I could have waited until tomorrow as I had planned to do and not discover that what I had banked on was not going to happen. Worry can be a good thing. It causes us to take action. But wouldn't it be better if we eliminate worry and simply chose action according to a rational view of the lay of the land?

In art and the activities where I seek artistic expression, there seems an unavoidable joining of tension and creativity. At lunch I caught a documentary on the Cliburn piano competition in Houston. Pianists young and old spoke of their art. A pianist who sits at the piano like "a bag of potatoes" is not going to ignite the audience with passion for music. It is when he sits at the piano as though facing his mortal enemy and struggles with wood and steel to wring out passion that the audience feels passion, too. Passion after all is intense emotion and art cannot be art without that intensity.

We express intensity of emotion in our voice, posture, and something about attention that viewers pick up though cannot describe in words. It's in the way our eyes look like those of a madman, every muscle in our frame poised for immediate action that they might be called to render in a split second.

There is quiet intensity, too, when the body appears still but not lifeless. It's the tense quiet before the storm. I worry about intense emotions and feel I should be calm and relaxed but creativity like love always presupposed struggle, tension, life-and-death combat, expectation maybe of hyperbole but without throwing our lines towards heaven and the impossible art seems not to appear. We conjure it with our blood, sweat and tears!

Picking Up the Thread

Yesterday's shoot with Minda was my first since the round of shoots I did with male models that ended in July. The business of recreating myself and adding art to how I live my life is a stop-start process, something I should know by now but still strikes me anew every time.

Shooting models remains my first love in image-making. Reviewing photos as I processed and uploaded them this morning to Flickr and Smugmug, I am surprised at how good these images look even as I feel I am just scratching the surface of what I can do and really want to do.

After purchasing the mini-DV tape player last month, I have not worked with it since. I tried it out to make sure it worked but I've resisted doing actual work with it. I need to re-tape the interview I did of Sean. Of all the videos that I have shot, that alone strikes me as something I want to keep and work on. What I want to do with this seed video keeps changing. I want to create a video good enough for theatrical release. Increasingly, with my time and talent constraints, I think the best I could do is a documentary-type movie. 

Watching Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs this weekend inspired me. That was basically a documentary. He had gathered friends in an apartment in Chicago and over the course of a month shot them acting out scenes they improvised in collaboration with Joe. His accomplishment, what critics have called "mumblecore" is heralded as a new movement in independent filmmaking. Plot is secondary to conversations among normal-looking, young Americans doing what comes to them naturally. This is not the cinematic stuff Hollywood is producing. Large-scale scenes of heart-pounding scenery is replaced by intimate close-up scenes of people talking to each other in everyday lingo. The impact turns upon the trivial exchanges we make with each other that in our recollection of the day's activities are infinitely more important than any World News item. It's Web 2.0 catapulted to the big screen.

Relationships are my one persistent obsession. My days are relived scenes of relationships, of people discovering things about themselves, often alone but usually in relation to someone else. Alone our insights stagnate. In exchanges with someone or some others old views are fertilized and take on energy that feels very much like creative juice.

I want to continue taking still photographs of individual models but I also want to push into the interior of my psyche to create videos and text products. I don't know what products will see the light of public viewing but increasingly my faith grows: taking one step at a time, keeping close to what Joe Campbell called my "bliss," concepts take root and concrete products shaped. The process is as tantalizing as the products themselves.