Cooking with Vinegar in Spain's Former Colonies

This is tilapia escabeche from Tienda Morelos.

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In countries where refrigeration came late, freshly caught fish is often preserved for future consumption in Spanish-inspired techniques now associated with the Mexican ceviche. A variation is escabeche, lightly cooking the fish then marinating in vinegar and spices, a technique that works better when one lives inland or up in the mountains where fresh fish is not available.

In the Philippines, escabeche is a more elaborate affair. Fish, often cleaned and cooked whole, is fried then cooked in a sweet-sour concoction of vinegar, brown sugar, garlic, onion and maybe a little soy sauce to which are added chunks of sweet bell pepper, tomatoes, maybe slices of pineapple in syrup.

Raw fish preserved in vinegar we called kilawin, a technique used for other food stuff like pork ears, shrimp and prawn. Fish has to be really fresh. I remember tiny sardines that are quickly filleted then marinated in vinegar, finely chopped ginger, scallions and maybe a wee bit of garlic. The translucent flesh turns opaque when it is ready to eat. The finished product is used more like a condiment, in small doses often to accompany really rich viands like fried sole or mackerel steaks.

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Discovering Nectarines and Other Drupes

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I've lived in North America for over forty years but I've never had a nectarines until a few days ago. How could I have missed it? What happened was, I think, the fruit appeared toward the end of summer when I'm usually sated with the bonanza of fruits the season brings and I just skip its arrival as a non-event. Or maybe I thought the nectarine was not a true fruit but a cross between two fruit species and elitist that I sometimes can be I decided it was not worth my time to discover this luscious delight.

I blame Trader Joe's for introducing the fruit into my gustatory repertoire. Last week they advertised white nectarines as something to try because it was sweeter than the usual nectarines. True to form I didn't see "nectarines" and though the fruit was "white peach." I didn't discover my mistake until I was ready to serve the fruit to a friend and bragged how this was something new, a white peach. He corrected me: it's nectarine. Nectarine? I salvaged the label from the trash and sure enough it read nectarine, but white nectarine.

Anyway I went ahead, cut and served it. I sunk my teeth into my half of the fruit and juice squirted all over the place, overflowing and dripping out my mouth. I felt momentarily silly until the experience blocked out any other sensation. I was conquered territory. I'm now a fan.

I explored produce in other markets and decided to try the regular nectarines. Those are juicy too but the flesh has a different quality. It's translucent whereas white nectarines have fine sandy, milky flesh. I can see how people think of nectarines as crossed cultivars of plums because regular nectarines have flesh that look and taste like plums.

In fact nectarines are cultivars of peach except that their skin is smooth so that sometimes they're called "shaved peach." Like peaches they're believed to have originated in Central or Eastern Asia although Europeans initially believed peaches came from Persia, hence the name peach from French peche, from Latin malum persicus.

Like regular peaches, white nectarines should combine with banana and the usual fruits I blend with dairy to make my post-workout meal in the morning. I am not as keen about plums or regular nectarines because the consistency of the flesh is different. They would show up like translucent or glass-like fragments, which I suppose, can be attractive too, like tapioca "pearls" in Taiwan iced bubble teas or "nata de coco" in Philippine halo-halo.

Nectarines like peaches don't do well in the tropics. They are summer fruit in temperate countries. Nonetheless our summer harvest of fruits in North America take me back to the tropics and their unique fruit offerings. Wherever we are, we develop our own list of favorite foods, what become our comfort food, food we associate with the good times. White nectarines is joining that list for me.

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A Fitness Formula That Works

I've heard it so many times, I've even preached it myself, but sometimes we don't act until we're in a corner and have to do it. Fitness is a lifestyle and improving health and fitness means modifying my lifestyle. When things are going well, too well, it is easy enough to swell our ego with talk but nothing gives true confidence, faith if you will, than seeing the evidence with our own senses.

Okay, health is an ongoing concern. It is ongoing because our goals change over time and, more to the point (corner), our bodies change. The demands we place on our physical, psychological and spiritual beings change, too, and, hopefully, with time and the experience of well-observed time we may learn a little more about ourselves and the world that impacts our concept and therefore goal for health and fitness.

Quitting regular outside employment two and a half years ago was more difficult than I thought it would be. For years I'd actually been moving towards this change but when I did finally take the plunge (okay, I'm switching metaphors from home interiors to sea) the repercussions were greater than I thought they would be. Now, why did I think I knew about this change before actually implementing it? Didn't I just write that time and the observation of what transpires in time are necessary ingredients to growing and learning?

One of the concomittants of the decision I took was the loss of the very structure that motivated me to make the change in the first place. Constructing a new structure to take the place of the old is in itself a process. It's again not a project we can fully anticipate and work out ahead of time. I guess there is a kind of genius to the whole process. If we can learn without experiencing i.e. living and observing what happens in time what's the point of living? Okay, this is not correct logic.We live because we are living. Introjecting meaning into living is something else and not the raison d'etre for living itself. If learning is not the reason for living, it does give meaning to it. That's just one of the ways we can look at living, of course. For others, living is loving. Or, for others, living is for finding what they call God. For me, living is just living but slathered all over the cake (another metaphor change) are the various icings we concoct to make what is essentially joy itself feel joyful. And that is what I mean by the genius of mindful living.

Back to the title of this piece (more of the preceding in subsequent written-out thinking). This is what seems to have worked for me just in the past two weeks. 

Regular aerobic exercise, at least five times a week, daily being better still, starts the day best in terms of waking up energy for creative activity. Since I'd gained 10 lbs. in the past year, resuming a regular walking regimen felt harder than in the past when I'd slack off and start over again. I should know. I've been working out an exercise program that works for me for some 25 years. (I remember that first day I stepped out of the apartment to go walking for the first time. The body was heavier than the world on Atlas's shoulders! My! It got better over the years and I've been more often on a program than not. Then again I'd not weighed as much in the past as I do now!

My goal two years ago was to bring my weight down to 168 lbs. That would make my BMI accord with recommendations for my age, reduce my sugar to well below the maximum healthy pre-prandial concentration, and tune down my bad cholesterol. (Other than these, my physical health couldn't be better!) Instead, I gained 10 more pounds!

Through trial and error, with lots of help from my physician/friend, Kevin, I've found out that taking a mouthful of raisins, wheat bran and grouts, and raw or dry-roasted almonds with 500 mg L-carnitine gives me the energy boost to take my morning walk to cardiovascular levels again. My capacity still has ways to go but it's now up to where it was last year when I was walking five to eight miles a day on the Monon. That was insane. It was taking too much time—2 or more hours a day—and my feet and legs were taking a punishing they didn't like!

Now I just do 2 to 3 miles a day, occasionally spurt to 5 or 6 miles, and my feet feel fine. I've been doing interval running which counterintuitively seems to be helping my lower back. What really proves the point to me is the slow, steadier weight loss. It's not much but unlike before when my weight fluctuates all over the map (the final metaphor change), now it stays closer to the range. And I can feel my belly again.

Frankly I wanted to lose the weight to have more energy and flexibility again. That belly gets in the way of some of the things I used to enjoy doing, like some yoga asanas. Then again I didn't use to have to deal with deteriorating cartilages but this is why formulas for fitness, for happiness, for joy don't stand still. We change, they change. Without change, how do we know time? And without time, can we know we're alive?

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Easy Summer Fruit Sherbet

As the sun blasts us and the earth in July and August, we can still take comfort in the abundance of fruits and vegetables burgeoning from the fertile earth. What to do with this bonanza while trying to stay cool? Think fruit sherbets!

The old way if you don't have an ice cream maker is to blend the mix, freeze in an ice cube tray, stir every 15 minutes while the mixture solidifies until you have a smooth frozen concoction. My way is easier. Freeze chunks of fruit, process quickly in the blender and voila! Sherbet that satisfies the sweet tooth while keeping your fat and cholesterol intake low.

Here's the recipe for blackbettery peach sherbet: For two huge servings, take 1 C. of frozen banana,1 C. fresh chilled ripe peach, 1/2 C. frozen blackberries, 1/4 C. each orange juice and whole milk, 2 Tb. whey protein powder and a basil or mint sprig for garnish. I use Bally's Performance Whey Protein that is sweetened with Splenda but you can use any good quality whey protein and skip the sweetener or add a little demerara cane sugar or honey. Pulse in the blender and serve!

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The World Is Flat

Unless you’ve been living under a bushel (not letting your light shine as beacons for others and without nearby WiFi) you’ve noticed our world has changed. It’s no longer the world of your parents or even the world you yourself were born into.

It’s the same earth but, at least on the surface of it and on what paleontologist and Jesuit priest Teilhard du Chardin and Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky called the noosphere, there’d been great changes especially in how its dominant species, homo sapiens sapiens, lives. 

(The changes do not go deeper usually than a few feet under the surface and earth remains despite our arrogant illusions very much its own self with its own laws that shall outlast even the longest lived senior of our or any other generation. When we act forgetting this, the earth reminds us with unforgettable force that it remains above our human laws and expectations.)

Civilization with its infrastructures has changed from the time of the pyramids at Saqqara and Giza or the so-called Seven Wonders of the ancient world (of which only the Great Pyramid is the lone survivor). One need only look at pictures of the new Shanghai skyline to see how architecturally things have changed.

One of the most exciting changes to me is the globalization of commerce and industry in this digital age. This is the subject New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman explores in his 2005 book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. To Christian Europe before Columbus the earth was flat. The Genoese believed that he would find India not by going east but by crossing the great sea going west. He was the first to act on a guess that the earth was round and that going one direction one could get at the same place as someone going in the opposite direction.

Friedman who won the Pulitzer Prize three times for his work with the New York Times wrote how he came to realize the earth had changed shape again. He was shooting a documentary on the Indian company, Infosys, exploring how India and Bangalore in particular had become such a major pool for outsourcing service and information for North American and European companies.

Infosys CEO, Nandan Nilekani, was telling him that in a world of digitized knowledge, countries like India could now compete for global knowledge work. “The playing field,” Nilekani told Friedman, “is being leveled.” The phrase kept playing in Friedman’s mind like a broken melody until the realization hit him: “My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!”

With the distant places on the planet now connected via satellite and fiber optic cables, communication occurs in seconds via this all-encompassing highway. Someone in Dalian in China (another rapidly emerging outsourcing center) could pick up the phone when I call from Dallas, Texas about my Internet service and the I wouldn’t have to wait that much longer than if the Dalian was sitting at an office across the street. Isn’t this amazing?

There are limits to these arrangements. Dalian gets business from Japan by training hundreds of mostly young Chinese to speak Japanese just as Bangalore service representatives learn to modify their Indian English accents to approach Midwest American sounds but there are limitations that go beyond language.

I experienced this firsthand when I recently called AT&T. The 800 number routed to an extremely pleasant young woman, Danielle, somewhere in India who efficiently answered my questions by consulting her computer screen. She read the pertinent guidelines for setting service and insisted that I was under an annual contract with AT&T. Fortunately I asked to speak to someone else and she switched me to the Disconnect Department

This department was stateside. Tom indeed sounded like Tom. There the customer representative was able to access more customer-specific data and told me that indeed I was not under such a contract. He suggested that in the future I should ask to be connected to his department, which I did when a few days later I made the decision to switch from DSL to cable and discontinued my land phone line. (The landline is going the way of pyramids just as, debunking religious belief, we’re disposing of our dead in less earth space than pyramids or cemeteries.)

What is leveling the field, flattening the world, is not only the speed of telecommunication but the nature of the most rapidly changing commodities and services of our modern world. These are often software-generated products that can be sent in digitized form, packets of information so tiny millions of them travel along innumerable pathways blanketing the earth, physical manifestations of Chardin’s noosphere. Who would have thought in the time of Columbus and the Catholic Monarchs (Reyes Católicos) of post-Muslim Spain that just 1 and 0 (0s are Muslim inventions) could build edifices more powerful than brick or even stainless steel.

As the manufacture of physical products move ineluctably to where labor is cheaper (because the locals are willing to work with passion and dedication for much less money than North Americans or Europeans), industrialized countries are having to re-invent the world. What advantage they still possess today largely consists in technical knowledge and research facilities and superb universities where new knowledge is generated. We’ve become knowledge purveyors, our greatest assets what we dream of in our heads, noosphere.

This state of affairs is rapidly changing, too. Friedman quoted the communist mayor of Dalian teach him about capitalism: “The rule of the market economy,” said Mayor Xia, “is that if somewhere has the richest human resources and the cheapest labor, of course the enterprises and the businesses will naturally go there.” At the time of the book’s research, Dalian had twenty-two universities and colleges with over two hundred thousand students! Xia further emotes: “My personal feeling is that Chinese youngsters are more ambitious than Japanese or American youngsters…”

There is market economics and then there is human economics. The former deals with financial laws, the latter with energy, ambition and spirit. People in poorer countries are forced by circumstance to work harder and improve their living conditions. We in North America or Europe are not so hungry or needy. I think this may in fact be a good thing. Maybe we don’t have to compete as rabidly in the dog-eat-dog world and set the pace instead in truly improving the depth and quality of our lives, focus not only on research knowledge but other forms of knowledge only those who live fairly comfortable lives have the luxury to explore. There is technology information and then what we still could call spiritual knowledge, Chardin’s noosphere.

Members of the our species, homo sapiens sapiens, are said to distinguish themselves from other species in the more elaborate, imaginative thinking of which we are capable. Following Maslov’s trajectory of personal growth, we might climb the pyramid of lessening suffering and increasing joy starting by first providing for our body’s needs. Having those satisfied we move up the hierarchy into satisfying increasingly more subtle needs but instead of stopping with self-actualization we could leap into the empyrean.

“What is quality?” asks Phaedrus in Robert Pirsig’s 1074 classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Mathematical values have changed our world so much, changed our perception of it from being flat to being round and now again to being flat again. Transcending the technological advances of the twentieth century maybe we can go full circle and with those peripatetic thinkers of fifth century BCE Athens concern ourselves with subtler enterprises.

We might, for instance, work harder at improving the lot of humans everywhere, what we call civil rights (because they are recognized by civitas or cities and societies). We can learn to recognize how we oppress ourselves and other people by the beliefs we hold, by plain, ignorant prejudice. After all a flatter earth means ultimately that we live that much closer to our neighbor and who is our neighbor?

According to Jesus of the Christians, our neighbor is whoever needs us, whoever our compassion enables us to connect with that the distance between us really goes nil, zero, and from round or flat earth we grow into one earth, one life blanketed by one all-encompassing thought, our noosphere.

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On Writing

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In the June 20, 2011 issue of Time, David McCullough discusses writing and its importance (10 Questions):

“The loss of people writing—writing a composition, a letter or a report—is not just the loss of the process of working your thoughts out on paper, of having an idea that you would never have had if you weren’t [writing]. And that’s a handicap. People [I research] were writing letters every day. That was calisthenics for the brain.”

This is why I write and why I don’t feel I’ve done a day justice if I don’t write. Writing helps me document my thoughts, organize and make sense of them i.e. connect them with the overall picture of thoughts I’ve been constructing all my life, and, in the process, stumble into insights and new ways of seeing myself and the world.

Assuredly there are many other people who don’t think of writing on par almost with sleep or eating. They go through life unconcerned with meaning or significance. What’s happening now is all that matters and it is good enough. I am everlastingly concerned about myself, how I should live, why I should live. I’m a masochist, and selfish to boot.

Writing for me surely is both familiar pleasure and questionable good. Writing is one activity I’ve done for so long and done so long because it has repeatedly given pleasure. I say I write to know myself—the “unexamined life” and all that—but its benefit here is dubious. I write because I enjoy writing.

I might even essay that I need to write as some people need to paint or versify or run for political office. It’s my true vocation, not the avocation it was through my adult life till now. I love the slippery rocks that are the words and phrases writers employ to enter into their world of creation. Sometimes they’re just there at the river where you’re crossing it to the other bank but usually you have to go up or downriver searching for just the size or heft of combination of them you need for the hut you’re building by the rushing waters.

Writing is meditation. Both the external and the familiar, doggedly pernicious internal world disappear; I even disappear. There are just the ideas with their precious freight of energy.

When writing my whole responsibility is simply to respect the energy and let it lead me where it may that I can take the ideas to a kind of universal intelligibility. For me this is art: transforming an individual experience, object or idea into its superhuman relative, which communicates that something behind it to anyone who’s looking.

Let those with eyes see… but first I must see it with my own inner eye. Art is really just the energy artists struggle to find within themselves, a primordial, archetypal energy like to that of Yahweh or the artificers of the world’s great myths and religions.

So writing is an activity within the realm of the religious, if by religion we mean our yoking ourselves to something bigger than we are. Writing is a writer’s vehicle to transcendence as painting to a painter, sculpture to a sculptor, mathematizing to a scientist. 

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Mung Bean Stew with Jackfruit and Spinach, and Malaysian Salt Red Fish

Mung Bean stew is an old favorite from childhood days in the Philippines. I never cooked this when I still lived in the islands. In fact I didn't cook much until I came to the Promised Land. So when I cook Filipino foods today I base the recipe on memory. Nostalgia is a powerful teacher, much less necessity in the old saying about invention. Today's stew, cooked while freezing rain was causing a racket against the window glass, was a last-minute concoction.

Ingredients: mung beans (monggo in Ilonggo), garlic, onion, tomatoes, olive oil, Malaysian salted Red Fish, canned jackfruit chunks, fresh spinach, and salt. I boiled the beans and fish until almost tender. I sautéed garlic, onion and tomato in olive oil, salting as I cooked. I added the beans and jackfruit chunks and simmered until beans were tender. I added spinach, corrected the salt and presto! A wonderful, fragrant soup against which the ice storm outside was no match! Served with brown rice tenderized with dried kelp, it was lunch for a king.

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Pinakbet Tagalog Style, Vegetarian

Ingredients:

3              garlic cloves, peeled, crushed, chopped

2              shallots, medium, sliced

2              Roma tomatoes, chunks

2 Tb.              Olive oil

3 C.              String beans, cut 2 in. long

1 ½ C.       Okra, frozen and defrosted, or fresh

2 C.              Butternut squash, steamed till fork-tender, 1 inchchunks

              Salt to taste

2 Tb.              Coconut flakes (Optional)

              Water or vegetable stock, as needed

 

Directions: 

1.   Heat oil over medium high heat. Sauté garlic and shallots till fragrant.

2.   Add tomatoes and cook, stirring, 1 minute or until tomatoes are soft.

3.   Add string beans, cover, lower heat and cook 2 to 3 minutes until tender.

4.   Mix in squash gently. Add stock or water if desired for a little sauce. Correct salt.

5.   Serve hot over Basmati rice, topped with coconut shavings.

 

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Song of the Open Trail

My second hike on the Monon was a kind of rebirth. Until Sunday I had not hiked the trail since summer last year. We're still in the throes of a heat wave so that even at eight the sun's rays still sting. In the sylvan shade however (and much of the trail from 96th Street to the Carmel City Center north of Carmel Drive is shade), one walks in comfort. The greenways of Indianapolis are one of her secret treasures that few people experience. That's a pity because walking the trails I seem to leave the city behind and enter into another world, a simpler world where cars and motors are not evident. It's an egalitarian world. Without their vehicles, their business clothes, people are just people on the trail, each one relying on sheer body strength to journey through the byways. Bikes are the most advanced machinery on the trail and by the rules of the trail they have to yield to those on foot. Even motorists where the trail crosses the street in Indianapolis, most stop to let the trail denizens pass. To be one of these temporary citizens of the trail is to feel a privileged person, someone who has rediscovered the simple pleasures of walking the earth on one's own power.

The landscape changes as I walk from one segment of the trail to the next. Between Broadripple and 74th Street, I cross the White River on modern steel bridges, walk past cafés, then the art center and blind school, past the backyards of modest dwellings. Carmel has really done a super job with her segments of the trail. There the trail goes into lighted tunnels and on hill-like overpasses for breathtaking views of the growing city of Carmel. I walk past businesses but with a different relationship to them. Walking without my wallet I am no longer a consumer. The world, both natural and man-made, is just there to enjoy. It truly is the joy and freedom of the trail in the midst of the cities, a foretaste even of a different way of being.

Morning Coffee for the Creative Juices To Flow

Now that I've substituted going to Lifestyle Family Fitness for going for a cup of McDonald senior coffee, a once-in-a-while treat is brewing coffee at home.

For coffee like what you get at a café on the Champs-Élysées or the Piazza Navona, without ther vaunted ambiance, of course, the Bodum is eminently suited. The French press, also called a cafetiére á piston, was popularized in New York City fifteen or so years ago when my friend, Ingrid, gave me one for a gift. It's perfect for making two espresso-sized cups of meltingly strong coffee, a heady brew one quaffs by the exquisite mouthful like ambrosia!

Here I've pictured my ancient French press with a recent acquisition, a long-handled coffee measure perfect for dipping into a bag of Starbuck's pre-ground coffee. Sometimes a simple gadget like this turns a plebeian act into something like music, art for the eyes as much as for the palate.

There are many ways to live: we each must find our own way. There is, I believe, a balance between hedonistic simplicity and the overly materialistic way of the average American consumer. I try to navigate my own way between the two extremes, delighting in the tension of choice and desire.

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Fitting into the Mainstream

There is much to be said for being average. You don't get hassled as much i.e. you get hassled the average amount in grade school and high school, certainly not in college unless you opt for a fraternity, and never to the point of getting PTSD unless you join the military. Everything works out seamlessly, from babyhood to toddler to grade schooler to dating in high school and the first summer jobs, graduating from high school and becoming old enough to smoke, to drink and to vote. For many there's college then the first post-college job and you're on the conveyor belt thereafter with little time to look around you and notice if this is where you want to be. You get married, raise kids, get promoted, retire and move to Florida.

John Waters is not average. His interview with Terry Gross on June 3 hooked me like a drug addict to heroin. His story is pebbled with so many similarities to my own story except that he seems to have moved from "hysterical misery into common unhappiness" and I have not. But that's not true either. I still fall into deep misery as I used to as a teenager but now misery is accompanied by a kind of awareness. I am not altogether alone when I'm miserable. If nothing else misery keeps me company. I'm there and so is he.

In real life few people are average. We're all neurotics, as Waters's hero Freud concluded in the 19th century. Some have more dramatic or flamboyant neuroses but theirs are not the worst. I think the worst off are those who are buried in the past, those who bought into the trauma of their young, growing selves, that they are trapped there the rest of their lives. We're all victims of our egos, trapped forever in how we view ourselves and through those glasses view the world around us. Society is itself like opera glasses that we don't take away from our eyes. To discover that we have eyes that can see without benefit of those glasses is life-transforming.
The only hope I've encountered is described by mystics, especially the Asian sages like the Buddha. I date a rebirth of my own neurosis from the nine days I spent in April 1986 when I attended a retreat with Ruth Denison. Sometime around the fourth day I found those primordial eyes. For moments I detached from the stream of compulsive thoughts, urges, memories and desires and realized there was more to experience beyond the stream. Henceforth, while not all the time, I saw me and saw that it was not all there was. I can pat myself on the back or shake my finger at myself. It's quite a feat. It's my sort of miracle.

Culture is awesome. It's where we come to affix meaning to what our physical senses and minds feed us. From culture comes the wonderful creations of humans from the dawn of time. From culture and in culture we create literature, art, politics, morality, religion, the whole shebang! But culture and ego are not all there is. Alongside them, silent but more potent than them, walks something other. Some may call this God. I don't know. All I know is that I am not alone.

Having established this, instead of suffering in misery I can learn to play. Waters made his living from his being different. Instead of hiding the unsavory pieces of his neurosis, he turned them into movies and now a book, Role Models. He is a role model. We can turn our unhealthy lives into something grand. All it takes is a certain disidentification from it all, learning to soar while immersed in the mud. Mud is beautiful!

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Singapore April 18, 2010 Marina Bay/Singapore Flyer

The group in front of Sakura International Buffet Restaurant. This is whole gang, right?

Singapore April 14-15, 2010-Tour Around Singapore

The Ga family at the Singapore Harbour. Stunning picture!

Gerald Brenan on how art should be judged

I'm meeting with the Pen2Paper Meetup group at seven tonight. At lunch I brought along my folder of short stories. I was newly impressed with how thick the file was and how many stories I wrote between 1988 and 1989. I had always remembered those stories as being overwrought, prose too flowery, plot limited to self-indulgent, self-fulfilling stories. I read three stories this afternoon. Two brought tears to my eyes. Hmmm...

Gerald Brenan in his preface to  his 1951 survey, The Literature of the Spanish People (as opposed to literature written in Spanish), summed up his philosophy on art criticism. Every work, he wrote, whether a poem, novel or painting "can be anything—that is to say, can have any form or content—so long as it evokes feeling." That's a to-the-point as anything I've read about what art should be. He writes further, "I believe that one of the principal functions of art and literature, second only to the immediate delight and elevation of mind they give, is the manner in which they display the range and diversity of mind and experience open to human nature—thus putting us into the skin of persons very remote and different from ourselves and so mitigating our chronic state of self-imprisonmennt..." Works of art are to be valued "by the depth and quality of the experience they convey, rather than by their moral or ideological rightness. Ethical considerations only come in when they affect that experience by extending or diminishing it.

I've started so many prose works—I call them "text products" which hints at how I feel about what I have been doing—since 1989 but have not finished a single piece, not even a paragraph-long work. The bug for writing apparently came to life then as quickly went away. In a similar way, I wrote poems in 1972 filling a steno notebook then the flourish ended. These past two years I've trained what creativity I have to shooting images. I have been most successful shooting models. After processing three images from the four-hour shoot with Austin yesterday I hazard to think yesterday's shoot was my best so far. Both Austin and his girlfriend, Jacqueline, whom I shot in April, were so into the shoot. I was tired when we finished but felt we'd done something worthwhile. Austin too felt it. He told me he'll recommend me to the clients at the gym where he works as trainer.

Rereading my short stories reiterated a truism that I've found time and again. Memories are unreliable. What little we remember of the vast amount of sensory and mental events that stream through consciousness 60 seconds a minute, 24 hours a day, 24/7 has been edited into what Asian meditation teachers call ego. What fits our idea of who we are might stay to validate ego but even what remains often is misperception. Ego reshapes events. Art is reshaping events into something meaningful. Both art and ego are constructions of the mind. Why not go for art since ego or "reality" is just as perniciously false?

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Developing concepts for video projects

San José, Museo Iloilo, Philippines

I have two ideas for a video project. One I've had for a couple of years now, especially after I started shooting young Indiana models. I am meeting with Arron to brainstorm with him. I'd like him to be part of the project, as subject or co-writer or co-photographer. I want to document how young people in America, in this case, small-town Indiana, adopt values, develop and modify them based on personality traits and experience. I am interested in values related to relationships (how do they view intimacy, relationships, family), religion, work and friendship.

Next I want to locate a couple of documentaries in the Philippines. My interest is two-fold, both what I call pre-global. I want to document the disappearing Spanish influence in the islands, especially on church music, religious-cultural holidays and indigenous religious beliefs. Some people urge conservation of natural resources. I think much of culture especially in the smaller countries need to be, if not preserved, documented for people to learn from after they're gone or irreparably changed. I want to document indigenous beliefs that pre-existed Spanish conquest or that appear related to Asian cultures prior to the arrival of Europeans.

I've always been interested in psychology, what motivates individuals, how they see their world and their position in it, and how they go about accumulating experience. My interest has moved from helping individuals change their psychological patterns to documenting and understanding the psychological principles governing societies and cultures. Change is inherent in systems so my ambition is not so much to facilitate it as to understand why and how it occurs.

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Documenting Small Town Life

My sister and I drove to Michigan last week. It was our first trip for the sake of traveling in decades. We stopped traveling in the U.S. when we discovered Europe. This trip whetted my appetite to travel more. Working at home is ideal for slugging along but unfamiliar scene and experiences ignite more explosive energy. I have never been able to work steadily, daily, even when I don't feel a whit of creativity. Published writers say one must toe the line and write every day no matter how one feels. That strikes me as being true; I just can't do it!

This was taken at the Comfort Inn where we stayed in Mackinaw City the morning after we arrived. All day while we drove from Holland the day before rain fell. Sunshine was not expected Friday so when it began to leak into our room the energy tumbled in with it. We took the ferry to Mackinac Island where I was able to take some more photos before the sun disappeared. It was cold. Winds ravaged the island. I had on a thin jacket and huddled closer to Merma as we took an open-coach tour of the island.

I decided to take a break from lynda.com and focus on mastering Photoshop the rest of May and start on Final Cut Pro in June. Arron's sister writes music and agreed to provide music for a video featuring Arron. The concept is nascent. When I first met Arron he lived in Cambridge City one and a half hour east of Indianapolis. I have been intrigued with small-town life in Indiana since I moved here in 1976. I would like to make a 20 to 30-minute documentary about the life of young Hoosiers—the late high school years and early college, exploring careers, making friends and starting relationships. Freud focused on love and work as the main features by which a person's mental health is gauged. These two plus friendships should make an interesting commentary on modern, small-town American life.

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Attraction and Lust: The Ethics of a Shoot

One of my projects is to shoot nudes but capture images that awe rather than inflame, connecting the viewer with the beauty of bodies like the beauty of mountains or water or sky. The line between pornographic and art is thin, even hazy at times. Think Robert Mappelthorpe, a boldly artistic photographer with his brazen images of black men that burst stereotypes of beauty and candor. When I shoot an attractive model I know when lusting is keeping me from viewing the model as a photographic study. Lust is part of our experience of attraction and I do need a certain attraction to the model to get my curiosity up. Without that attraction the work of photography is just that, work, and I'm not interested doing that. Life's too short to spend on transient fancies. I have to have the initial attraction then shelve it and move into what I call "the zone." There I am lose being involved with persons, with myself, with the model or models. My attention is on creating the image. I treat the model with respect as one does a fellow human being but the personality they project is just another element to calculate into the total picture. We're both in a professional mode, what I call artistic integrity.

Maybe this is unrealistic. The genre is full of stories of divas and divos, of temperamental artists, whose work we all adore but the process by which they arrive at the luminous images flares with caprice and emotional dyscontrol. I've worked like this many times in other than artistic work. The creator begins to feel like god; everything else, everybody else, must serve the ends of creating. When the image is captured we may forget the travail, happy only for what we've created but this feels somehow not enough. The dyscontrol lingers, if not in the work itself when others view it in the soul of the maker. When the chatter dies, in the depth of night or as life ebbs away, all we have is soul. Soul matters.

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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.

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Fields of Violets

They say old men more and more dwell in the past. In the past is innocence like unto the innocence of the couple before Eve took a bite of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and persuaded her spouse to do likewise. Product marketing in the U.S. keeps coming up with the "original" this and that, as if the unimproved version from bygone times is somehow better. Byzantine iconoclasts of the 8th and 9th centuries argued against the proliferation of images and for a return to the nonrepresentational worship of old.

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)

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Murmur of the Heart Today

After a winter chuck full of dark, cold days, spring is welcome indeed. Without any disruptions this year (in Kansas, my sister reported a spring snow storm that froze daffodils), bulbs, shrubs and trees have taken their turn showing off their reproductive strategies. Tulips are still opening but the daffodils, except the late-blooming varieties, are crunchy paper-thin ghosts. The almond trees are starting to show green under all that white efflorescence, cherries weeping and laughing endure. In the garden, the tree tulip bears just four buds. During the winter, snow removal chopped off two main branches and the tree is now busy sprouting new shoots from the ground for next year. I am raring to get me a new rosemary bush for the deck. Rosemary-and-sage roast fowl beckons, as well as rosemary-scented lamb and pork chops on the grill.

Last night I watched Louis Malle's Le souffle au coeur (Murmur of the Heart, 1971), which does not refer to the boy, Laurent Chevalier's rheumatoid heart ailment that led to his stay at a sanatorium with his mother, Clara. It refers to the fifteen year old's coming-of-age when France was struggling to hold on to its Indochinese possessions. It depicts Freud's Oedipal complex but without today's strum und angst over sexual abuse rattling the West and the Catholic Church. After their night together, Clara, the mother, tells her son: "This won't happen again but we'll both think of this night with tenderness, not with remorse or guilt."

Malle who also directed another of my favorite movies, Dinner with André, created a masterpiece of nuance, images of a bygone era and of how things used to be tender now just crass and obscene. It depicts a Europe that even today holds a mirror to America showing how we here in the New World have much to learn from the old when it came to the truly profound human values that characterize the West. I'll be looking for more Malle-directed movies and when I do make my own will remember this movie for its delicate images and tenderness.

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