Friday, April 23, 2010
Attraction and Lust: The Ethics of a Shoot
Saturday, April 17, 2010
How the East Was Won
We live our four-score years a matter of genetics, family influence, personal choice, and, largely, luck. I’d like to think I make deliberate choices. I’ve bought into the American dream: individual freedom reigns. But I’m Asian at the core: interconnection determines not only the life we live but who we become. We are jewels caught in Indra’s net that weaves us into one, indivisible fabric.
While working at the USAF base in Angeles City, Pampanga, trying to forge connections to land me in America, I met one of the women in that weave of destiny. Mattie was an African-American nurse who one evening, from what goodness of the heart I’ll never know, invited me to her house on base for dinner.
I remember the feeling today. There I was a man-boy, desperately trying to put himself back together, the shining future he had once envisioned now shards of broken glass. The base was a capsule of America. On school buses, teenage girls chewed gum. Servicemen would fly McDonald burgers from CONUS and shared the smell and taste of home with his friends. The base insulated Americans from harsh reality. They shouldn’t have to deal with more war than the war in Vietnam. To me the base was the Promised Land, exciting and scary.
I don’t remember what Mattie served for dinner. I remember sitting at her spinet afterwards to play and sing American show tunes. She left me alone for a minute and came back with a book she felt I should read. I was Asian, of course, shouldn’t this be my natural bent? The Bhagavad Gita was every bit as wise and inspiring as the Christian Bible. I didn’t know what she was talking about.
Aside from my aunt, Dayde, Mattie was the first person to crack the door of orthodoxy into a whole, other world beyond. Back then, Asian art, religion and history were below my mind’s periscope. I was miserable and anxious only to escape. The West shone on the horizon like Abraham’s Canaan. There I would find home because where I was didn’t feel like home. No god dealt covenants to me. I had no choice.
It was only after I stopped attending church that my mind opened to other varieties of religious belief. In the early 1980s I found myself swept into the New Age movement. I went to gatherings in Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, New York and California, met new friends, tried on new practices: Sufi dancing, Midsummer festivals, channeling, unorthodox Franciscans, energetic bodywork, men’s groups, Gaia, etc. I was agog. Here were the inner fires I’d been missing.
Like breath, like water, the soul needs fire. We catch fire wherever we connect, whether we choose it or it flows to us from life’s amazing cornucopia of surprises.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Fields of Violets
I’m more iconoclast than conservationist but there is a sweetness in discovering the simpler delights of a simpler past. I’d be the last to throw out our technological advances like handheld jukeboxes and desktop movie theaters but once in a while, when the breeze is soft as it is today, fragrant with fruit-tree blossoms, tulips and lilacs, I turn heathen and cock an ear for Pan.
As we amass experience, turn from child to grown-up, a bit of the child lingers if only when the fields grow crops of violets and dandelions litter austere lawns with lemon gumdrops. Then we hark to the honeyed years of those first years of life when we didn’t know temptation or the pain of loving or even common sense: it was enough to sense and to know.
Wisdom brings more self-reflection. We learn to heel to societal right and wrong, become secure thinking we know it all, but the past finds its way to remind us how puny wisdom is, how trivial many a time, and how our hard-earned maturity is but a second skin: we are more than what we think.
As Christians, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, seek to understand the raucous phenomenon of priest abuse, many seek to hopscotch past the Catholic Church’s centuries of tradition to how earlier Christianity was like: marriage was no obstacle to priesthood and women held positions of influence from the time of Mary Magdalene.
Thinking I espouse opinions just like everyone else. I am a devotee to Logos and mind crystallized, some say fossilized, into words. Words help us navigate the uncertain, wonderful, endless landscape of the mind, its divine reaches, its impossible breadth. With words I can summon a space ship to explore this vast, ultimately unknowable immensity and old and new, sweet and bitter, heathen and believer, light and dark, tender and rough, live together.
“And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”(Isaiah 11:6) In fields of clover and violets shall I yet dance, on this spring day, on this spring day. (April 15, 2010)
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Murmur of the Heart Today
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Can conversation alone make a movie?
My Dinner with André always reminds me of my old "best" friend, Al. That friendship is every bit as complicated as that between the two actors. Al introduced me to the one-of-a-kind movie. Directed by the two's frequent collaborator, Louis Malle, the movie depicts a dinner conversation between Wally and André. I was reminded of the movie today at lunch while perusing the screenplay. André's Preface narrated the events in his life that led to the making of the movie. In 1976, to the consternation of friends and colleagues, he gave up his career in theater and like the White Rabbit (in Alice in Wonderland that he directed in 1970), he embarked on a New Age journey. "I went to Asia. I went to North Africa. I stayed up till odd hours of the morning talking to Buddhists and physicists about ancient mysteries." He questioned the future of theater and questioned his own place in the universe.
André's journey recalled my lifelong quest for my place in the universe. I jumped off the cliff to confront the question frontally two years ago and I'm still questing. The movie, now that I was reminded of much of the content of it, gives me an idea of the movies I want to make. After years working with distressed individuals and couples I am clearly interested in the inner lives of people. What do people think about when they're alone? Gregory wrote that he became interested in Shawn's idea to make the movie in part because it would allow him to talk about what he'd been through, his thoughts and the feelings his adventures brought up. What we think in the privacy of the bathroom may largely need to stay private but much of that seemingly useless cogitation might be interesting for others likewise prone to self-reflection.
I love emotional dramas and tragicomedies about love and relationships but putting these on involves people and money resources I just don't have. What can I do at this stage of my questing? I can do screenplays and videos portraying conversations about the ideas and feelings people explore in the privacy of their own thoughts or when talking to best friends. (Spouses won't be ideal for this sort of conversation. They invariably think they know us so well we won't get far talking about those parts of us we'd not shown them before. I'm with Wally on this.)
In the 1960s when I met Aldo, I explained to him once what I thought of intimacy. With a best friend or lover, the two of you are "on the same wave length." Love creates this feeling between two people but it's not real. The feeling enchants us into thinking we're the two people in the world in our special cocoon but it will take years to create the real McCoy. Friendship usually does not involve that intensity of emotion but the two are the vehicles by which we create what deists say they experience in their relationship with their god. My fascination is with inner journeys and the outer journeys like friendship, love and other relationships that enable us to realize the inside outside.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
A Natural Cycle of Failure and Gain
I have a photo shoot with Jacqueline and her boyfriend, Austin, on Saturday. She is competing at the 2010 Natural Buckeye Classic Figure competition and has been training intensely to rid herself of extraneous body fat. Her physical energy is down to basic. She asked me for my take on whether to do the shoot on Saturday or put it off after the show.
History is memory. We redo history as we gain new insights into ourselves. I know now that I didn't stop pushing when the wind went out my sail. In my despair life provided me other channels for expressing myself. The failure was failure to gain what wasn't mine to gain. The failure was the energy that kept me again and again reinventing myself and in the reinvention discover those places within me that now glorifies my life.