Time for Reflection

Instead of meeting Chuck at Sichuan in Carmel yesterday, I called him first thing in the morning and suggested we meet at the house. I would fix lunch for us and talk business afterwards. I didn't want the temptation of a Chinese buffet and apparently neither did he.

We learn from others. I had always objected to the idea of "learning" invoked, for instance, by people rationalizing painful experiences as occasions for learning. For me learning was acquiring knowledge that changed how we thought, made choices and subsequently acted. 

Yesterday's meeting made me reconsider the idea of learning. A glimpse of another person's life adds to the breadth of our own experience. Sometimes that glimpse actually changes our understanding of the world in which we take action and experience its results. More often when we don't take the time to reflect, compare and study what we have seen, we interpret it according to our existing understanding and our understanding remains unchanged. In both instances, we do "learn" in the sense that these new images are added to our panoply of images available to us when the subject comes up again.

In the last fifteen years, I have grown to value vicariously acquired images. I don't have to own majestic houses to enjoy their exteriors as I drive past them. I don't have own the garden to treasure memories of the flowers, shrubs and trees in someone else's garden I visit. Ownership is primarily psychological. We own something because it has entered our mind's eye. We call this experience. Material things though we own as a legal and civil concept. Our nature rejoices in the idea of ownership and aggrandizement is simply an expression of Self, this force within us that always seeks more of what is pleasant, less of the unpleasant.

Chuck has been regaling me with the delight he and his family takes in owning a powerful SUV and the trailer is hauls. Their vacations consist of taking these mammoth machines, icons of the wealth of this country, to drive to Florida or some other picturesque locations. This weekend he is taking his portable home to IU to spend time with his son, Adam, at Adam's fraternity house celebration.

For some, a portable home no matter that gas recently cost over four dollars a gallon is the icing on the cake we acquire from the labors of our lifetimes. We might envy them for the icing in their lives or feel puzzlement how they could value this or that so highly. We would like to think that people in a society hold the same values but this is true only so far. The idea of democracy is built on this premise: individual differences keep extreme communal action in balance.

What has this got to do with duende? Duende is not just the dark, mysterious, almost erotic force in art and experience that pulses with life and makes us dread and feel awe in its presence. It is to me ultimately the quality over time that I sense in my life. We have a set of standards for quality by the time we are, say, fourteen years old and these change little if we lived sixty, seventy or eighty more years. Beyond the acquisition of material objects, wisdom might consist in understanding the foundation for our happiness -- what makes us feel contented and charmed at the end of the day, satisfied at the end of our lives. Since we are seldom born with either wisdom or happiness, we acquire these through learning. 

To learn is to grow, to add to what we know and to what we can experience.

The Primal Imagination

My new neighbor, in dark slacks and IBM-blue dress shirt, is shaking off the dirt from his BMW's floor mat. Next door, another new neighbor is getting into his shiny black truck, Boxes Inc. emblazoned on the door. The road outside the study window is deserted after they drive away. The world has gone to work elsewhere. Here I am trying to conjure my own work world.

Again and again I realize I don't know how to think with imagination. I am schooled in logic and rationality, thin veneers over the child who felt inherently inadequate with his peers. They flew kites, hit one another with gusto in free-for-all fights, broke rules and reveled in the telling of these and other infractions. I felt inept. I was good out of fear and that goodness keeps me from breaking out of the defensive rationality my little self created as armor and weaponry.

Coming home yesterday afternoon from lunch at my new neighborhood Chinese buffet, I sought out the two-volume set of W. Somerset Maugham's The Complete Short Stories. His stories are dated. He writes about the "natives" like the Englishman whose empire still stretched around the globe. But his stories glitter ever more. He writes so easily that reading just the first couple of sentences he has already drawn you into his world. His narrator seems always that same dated Englishman, a writer no less, but each story is crafted like a solitary gem.

Noah Lukeman in his book, The First Five Pages, writes how the fiction writer does not "tell" but "shows." Instead of simply describing a scene, he should state facts. Avoiding adjectives and adverbs, he uses terse language, each word weighted and necessary. He conjures up vivid scenes and appropriately limned characters: the protagonist is clearly the protagonist, someone the reader likes or dislikes but captures his interest nonetheless. The hero, the villain, the obstacles, all come together in what Maugham writes of as the "shape" of a story.

I fell asleep after beginning the short story, Honululu, and woke up at six thirty this morning drenched in a vivid dream. I was doing my last consultation with group home patients. Two of the case managers were attractive young men, the kind that always makes me want to help. One was going to school in his spare time. I was encouraging the other, smaller and cuter, to do the same. I was thinking I could help him financially but didn't tell him so. 

The dream segued without a break into a scene at home where my parents were still alive. My older sister had booked a flight to Hong Kong with a client. She got the seat cheaply because the travel agent told her three people booking together would get a deal. A woman happened to be at the travel agency and they got the special price. I told Merma I would pay for her to stay an extra day so she could tour Hong Kong. Her eyes lit up.

I told my sister  I'd go, too, even if I paid an exorbitant price for airfare. I was thinking about my waking-life worries about prostate cancer. I didn't know how long I'd be living anyway so why not take every opportunity to do what I wanted to do? I went to a Filipino travel agency. The office looked like a bar. The pudgy Filipino owner showed me  brochures of hotels he could book for us. I asked him about flight tickets. I bought one without even checking the price.

Back home I noticed I had paid $2000 for the plane ticket. For that amount I could have flown back to the States. I still wanted to go on the trip. I woke up.

I imagine the creative mind to possess a kind of coherence similar to what I felt last night after watching Frederick Fonteyn talk about his movie, Gilles' Wife (La Femme de Gilles). He described how he felt shooting the deleted scenes and why he edited them from his movie. Sometimes, he said, you have to cut out even your favorite scenes because the movie doesn't need them. You shoot the scene and it influences subsequent scenes that you shoot. Then you don't need them anymore because what they captured are now in the newer shoots.

The creative mind works on two levels: on the rational mind that chooses not only on the basis of what it sees but with the subconscious mind where mythic images and iconic symbolism resides giving subtle shape to what is chosen. Creativity is a dance hinging on two worlds. I must work from the "real" world while keeping the door ajar so the inner world can give what I write or shoot that complexity that makes anything we create art. From our inner world to the viewer's or reader's, this is the route I should learn to create.

New Indeed!

Truly, creating a new career and a new life takes shape by hiking the trail, day after day, minute after unremarkable minute.

Through the jungle, leaping across ravines, dodging feral obstacles, navigating equally feral urban adversities, charging human and non-human barricades, the landscape changes as we go from frame to frame, day after day. That's adventure!

Envisioning the shift from working in a largely scientific field to doing creative, imaginative and artistic work was nothing compared to the reality of actually doing the shift. The sun this morning is brilliant in a brilliant autumn sky and my mood is up but there are days when defeatism reigns and I just do what I can. I recall that I am venturing into new territory, a field for which I have not been academically prepared. The notion didn't hit me when I started. It felt then that shifting would be as easy as tumbling down the hill with Jack.
I started with just the hobbyist experience of snapping pictures and the delight I took viewing digital images and graphic designs. Professional photography is much more than that. In this day and age, photography is no longer just taking the photos and mixing chemicals in the darkroom. Photography is taking pictures, processing them digitally and displaying them for people's enjoyment as well as commercial opportunities. One does it all.

I was fortunate to find a model that inspired me when I shot Kaleb. The adventure took me into the exciting field of modeling. I loved it. It was months before I realized I needed to learn more about processing the images and correcting color balance. 

Studio photography is another whole world to explore. There are nuances of lighting, setting the stage, using props, and, an area I have barely touched, creating the emotional pull from combining these elements.

Correcting a picture's color is just the first step, too. Becoming comfortable with the technology, I can liberate my organ of sight and create my own unique vision. Verisimilitude forms the basic first stage but vision is how we see things our own way. It is what we contribute to the diversity of human experience, of culture, and the joy we can take on the trail of discovery, accomplishment and desire.