I am often goaded to write when something in a book or magazine I am reading or a movie I've watched strikes me as curiously fascinating. The item may be an insight into human nature (or life, which is the same thing) because it corroborates what I recall having experienced. It may be information that again supports something I've suspected but that goes against common wisdom. It may not be any of these but still possesses an energy that stops my thoughts in their tracks as if a load of gold had dropped into their path. Energy is curious because it is no respecter of categories that my mind creates. Tonight the energy derives from two seemingly disparate sources.
Over dinner earlier I read the April issue of Portfolio and came across a beautifully laid-out advertisement for Hard Rock Hotels and Casinos. Arranged throughout the text were images of their properties scattered throughout the world, including a half-page photo of the China Grill at the Hard Rock Hotel Chicago. Jeffrey Chadorow had designed the space, patterns of circles on the neutral-color carpet and horizontal lines along the mahogany walls reminiscent of Japanese shoji screens.
The magazine also included an article by Matthew Cooper listing seven behind-the-scenes key players in Obama's White House. One of the seven, Lael Brainard was said to live in an $1.8 million home in Chevy Chase with her husband, a co-founder and CEO of a think tank based in Aspen. All the people on Cooper's list had served in high places in the government and in private enterprises. How much of the power and wealth that these people wield came to them because of their unique skills, how much from privileges they were born into, how much from knowing people in high places who opened doors for them, how much from hard work and dogged persistence?
Two nights ago, I watched Gus Van Sant's movie, Milk, and was surprised how powerful it was. I had expected a "gay" movie but found myself engaged by the magic of cinema, of images and their progression that captures us in the net of storytelling. The movie was so effective I lost awareness of myself. Neither my breathing nor awareness of a body part or anything that recalled me to myself intruded into my immersion in the story. It took my mind hostage and I was nowhere to be found.
The movie introduces Harvey Milk as a hippie-type closeted gay man who runs into Scott in the NYC subway and entices the younger man into spending the night with him. Scott tells him he didn't date men older than 40 but, demonstrating the chutzpah that later enables him to become the first openly gay man to be elected to public office, Milk quickly riposted: I'm in luck then because I don't turn 40 until midnight. In bed, presumably after making love, Scott reminds Milk it is now past midnight. Milk is forty and he realizes that he has not done anything he can be proud of in his life so far. He and Scott leave New York for San Francisco and Milk's life changes. It becomes a force that affected other people just as Van Sant's movie affected me.
What have done with my own life? This afternoon I did a photo shoot with a 20-year-old theater major at Ball State. It's the first shoot I did completely in manual camera mode. That for me is an accomplishment. The images so far I've looked at are superior to any I've produced in previous shoots but is this all I should be doing with my life? Weekends I go out to my favorite restaurants for dinner. Mornings when I wake up I read, evenings I go to the gym, after supper I watch a movie. Is this all? Is it enough?
Years of contemplating human destiny and the values that men and women have identified and tried to live through the centuries suggests how fame, political power and wealth are not all that common wisdom says they are. In their pursuit we become like rats on a treadmill, caught in a maze that feels meaningful but is in reality mindless habit and empty. When physical health is disturbed or death imminent many of us find ourselves waking up as if from a dream. What was meaningful is simply the momentum of decisions we took when we were too young to know what we were choosing. I've grown to value time to recollect myself and weigh the choices I am making.
Time is more important than anything we can achieve through effort or genes or luck. As long as we have time we're alive and as long as we're alive we can posit meaning anyway we want because meaning is simply something the mind creates. By itself it is nothing of enduring value. Meaning invests ideas and acts with value but, as Gotama the Buddha taught 2500 years ago, it's as evanescent as any content that passes through the mind. Mind, time and that curious energy I started this journal with are to me my most valuable possessions. Everything else stems from this trinity for together they constitute life.
While Joe was changing in the bathroom, I took my vase of daffodils and lit it in front of the white nylon background. Adjusting the camera's aperture opening, shutter speed and sensor sensitivity, I created the image below.
After 35 years in a profession founded on thinking and science, I took a sabbatical a year ago last May to better understand and appreciate images. Morality no longer dominates me. Religions too have lost their superiority. Relationships are wonderful but I've grown to accept that I enjoy solitude as much. I do still enjoy knowing about things, understanding elements of my internal and external environment but rising like the moon over the mottled lake water is this infatuation with images.
Lurking behind the fascination is yet another perennial preoccupation. If truth is nothing more than transitory knowing, if spirit is simply mind's projection beyond its pitiable limits, if charity and other virtues are at their core self-centeredness masked, then beauty while sublunary and deceptive is at least innocuous? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I might make some money from its pursuit but I also know it is just another meaning attached to what I do with time, energy and mind. Everything else is vanity.
In Chapter 40 of the sayings of the Hebrew prophet we know as Isaiah, the prophet is told to proclaim:
All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field:
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.
In Ecclesiastes, said to be the sayings of Solomon, King David's wise son, he says:
Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever...
All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing...
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us.
No comments:
Post a Comment