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.

Living In Time

This is the most attention I have paid to autumn since coming to America with its four seasons. Should I look back to this time of interest the colors will most likely be shades of yellow and brown contrasted with the crystal blue of the sky.

This morning, waking up to the drumbeat of rain falling on the roof outside my bedroom, I took my cup of Verona Starbucks coffee back to bed with me and read G. J. Whitrow's What Is Time? Snuggled in bed I wanted no interruption so I cancelled my lunch with Tony. What a wonderful meditation on time!

I have not done any more work on defining a text project since first opening Eric Maisel's The Art of the Book Proposal but elements of what he suggested fly about the mind influencing what I think. I have thought of writing a book on the theories and practice of  vipassana meditation using Western psychology and philosophy language. Whitrow's book underlined one of the areas about the practice that fascinates me the most: the concepts about time and memory.

Whitrow, after quoting Robert Hooke writing in the seventeenth century, said that what Hooke referred to as "the Soul" nowadays we would call the mind. He didn't explain how he made this transposition but it made sense to me as if I'd always known it. Soul and spirit are nowadays not much differentiated, the first term now hardly used as we immerse ourselves in the enlightened, more secular world of science, computer technology and global warming. While writers in the past differed in how they used the word "soul," it did seem to carry the burden of  the psychological component of our individual being where resided the historical collection of our exercise of choice, our subjective interpretation of events and our image of ourselves.

Buddha reportedly advocated the absence of self, what perhaps is best equated with soul, not that people did not experience self but on the contrary lived through self or the soul which is the reason why they suffered. The self was the individual's psychological processes which he or she refers to as reality but in actuality are something he or she collects in the course of life and imposes on an undifferentiated reality far vaster than the collection he or she makes. Critical to the operation of these processes is the element of time no matter that karmic time is understood in a very different way than time as understood in the West. In India, time might be described to be circular as opposed to linear, progressive time in the West but this is simplistic. Time in Buddhist philosophy is really chaotic, only superficially organized by karmic events. Buddha himself taught that there were four things a human being could never understand and karma is one of these.

The soul experiences time as memory. Science, of course, understands time as progression of events although some theories in quantum physics challenge linearity to events in a similar way that Buddhist philosophy thinks of chaotic time. Hugh Everett, for one, in PBS's Nova program, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, proposed another explanation of Bohr's thesis that electrons revolving around the nucleus of an atom are simultaneously present everywhere. Only when an observer observes them do they take concrete positions in space. Imagine that if electrons indeed are simultaneously present everywhere our concept of time goes bananas! Because time in the West is linear, Whitrow argues, deriving he claims from the dogma of Jesus Christ dying on the cross once and for always to save all humankind from sin committed all over the spectrum of past, present and future.

I doubt I would have the patience to sit down and develop the themes about time that reading Whitrow's book has inspired. I doubt I would ever settle down to one project I could develop into a book, a movie or a photographic project. Having said this I would also add that I doubt I know what I shall be doing in the future. Ancient cultures like the Mayan developed their ideas about time in an effort to control events in the future. We use the past nowadays for a similar motivation. Even our construct of the four seasons is in part an attempt to predict the regular recurrence of events in the future so that science in effect is a throwback to the pre-historic idea of circular and chaotic time. The Buddhist avoids paralysis by training himself to value the present and only the present. Take care of the present and the future takes care of itself.

Or as one of the survivors in the recent Heartland Film Festival movie, Stranded, decided after an avalanche cut off their oxygen supply: don't fight it, experience the moment.

It Begins with a Conversation

I missed going to any of the shows at the Heartland Film Festival yesterday to join the fun at the Parke County Covered Bridge Festival. Minda had left a message for me Friday night that she and Luz would be here by 8:30 if I called her at 7:30 Saturday morning to confirm. They did not get here till after 10. I was already talking to Tony about canceling the trip and moving it to this morning when M's BMW slid into the parking lot in front of the house. I made an executive decision to go and miss the film festival.

I don't regret the decision. Maybe having time away from the film festival would give me time to process the heady ideas coming from the shows I saw on Friday and what I heard from the filmmakers at the end of the screening.

Paul Murphy was one of the directors available to answer questions Friday night. He directed the New Zealand film, Second-Hand Wedding, his first feature after doing commercials for 20 years. He told us that the movie "started with a conversation." After you begin working on it, the project "takes on life of its own." 

These comments connected with me. I complain that we don't have dramatic geological formations and landscapes in Indiana. We are cutoff from the movie-making industry. Movie people are few and as far between as any scenic wonders in the country's heartland. But one does not have to look far for a story to tell or for an image to shoot. The crucial step is to take the step.

For years now I've been collecting inspirational stories of how other people made it, how they started. Movie actors, fiction writers, scriptwriters, visual artists, computer software geniuses, website entrepreneurs, film directors and producers, photographers: these are my heroes, theirs the story that intrigue me no end. Each one's story is different. I can look for the correct mixture of ingredients to make my own start and may be looking the rest of my life. The crucial step is to take the step.

The last two Saturdays going out in search of local images to photograph have moved my interest in photography farther than maybe the last year put together. Shooting models tops the experiences but more than this shooting ordinary scenes like the orange Oldsmobile in my front yard or M's son, Ken, peering at the honeybee he had been shooing away and decrying just minutes earlier suddenly seemed examples of beginnings to get started so a project, any project, can have a life of its own.

Four and Three

My interests do come and go. Along with fluctuations in my energies for productive work, this makes progress towards a goal that also keeps changing hard to define.

The excellence that this blog attempts to explore is disseminated among these three: photography, lifestyle, and writing. This morning, after visiting some Internet sites and signing up for vimeo.com, I felt my interest in videos rise like the phoenix. I have not thought much about videos since last April at the NAB conference but making commercial videos or "movies" is my fourth musketeer.

To mirror its arising (or is this just another instance of superstition?), Charlie Rose in last night's show that I watched at lunch chose guests from the movie industry. "Bob" de Niro, director Barry Levinson and producer/writer Art Linson graced the first half of the show discussing their movie, What Just Happened opening this coming Friday. Later Rose chatted with comedian Bill Maher and Larry Charles, director of the surprise hit, Borat, about their movie, Religulous.

Just before breaking for lunch I went through the 259 images on my Flickr photostream. These are not "astonish me!" images, nowhere close to the quality I am aiming for and with which I would have the gumption to invite the public to see and criticize but when viewed as a whole they are rather impressive. The mix of images I have, reflecting my interests, is unique to me. It is from this mix though not necessarily from every ingredient that my public work shall come from. I don't have my "voice" or "vision" yet but fate has already determined the grist for their mill.

I have not shot models since July. I miss the high of those shots although I have a feeling this present phase on the journey holds an important place in the overall schema. I want to finish at least Deke McClelland's tutorial before I start processing images from my "professional" shoots. Meanwhile I do a handful everyday, just to keep my spirits up.

As usual, the Internet sites I visited awed me by the virtuosity and "outside-the-box" thinking of artists, software engineers, and entrepreneurs. If I have my four musketeers, I also have these tres virgines: art, digital technology and entrepreneurship as the powers behind the musketeers. 

Life is too short for everything I want to do. This is how I feel when I am feeling creative. It's a feeling; I don't believe it to be true. Time at our disposal is important but what we become proud of as we become proud of children are small parts of the package. Our pride in our work is symbolic of the struggle that is life itself.

My Close-up, Mr. de Mille!

The struggle for supremacy between words and pictures continues. The winner gets my attention and whoever gets it makes it to the show.

The day was so pretty yesterday that I frittered the afternoon away taking pictures instead of going to the gym. I don't regret the lack of discipline. The pictures were great. Trees were turning, ahead of the crowd the maples. The red maple in the courtyard outside my bedroom window is aflame. Against the cloudless blue sky, the tree epitomizes the prettiest images of autumn in Indiana.

At Gloria Jennings' office yesterday I chatted with her office manager, Meredith. He has been writing a blog since last fall. He told me he was raised in a conservative Pentecostal family and was never allowed to swear. Now a grownup he has given vent to his feelings as he navigates through the pain of breaking up with his girlfriend and not being able to see their daughter. Cuss words have their usefulness and in his blog really shine.

Meredith is also pretty aware of his belonging to the African-American community. He writes, he told me, as he speaks, at least inside his mind. His written prose certainly is colorful and conjures tribal qualities, the unique way people in communities choose words and phrases to communicate with each other.

My own prose seems colorless by comparison. For years I've told the few people whom I've told of my occult dream to write for publication that I was still looking for my voice. To a stranger maybe I already have my voice, my own individual ways of using words and phrasing them to express ideas. Certainly the topics I write about when taken together help to identify me. I can't use tribal colloquialisms as Meredith does. That would not be me. And I am not interested in fiction, in re-creating myself to write something others might want to read.

However I do know that if I wanted to break through the glass ceiling and into the public sphere I must keep to some rules. So far I've written solely for myself. Frankly though if I didn't know me I would probably find what I write dull. I'd read a few words, diagnose the writer as inept and narcissistic and move on.

I've admired many published writers. I have a revolving gallery of prose heroes. I can pinpoint what they are doing right; I just can't make myself write as they do. 

The latest is Tahir Shah, the offspring of "Afghan royalty" who grew up and now lives in the U.K. I came across his second book, Trail of Feathers, at Half Price yesterday before I decided to junk going to Bally and spend the rest of the day snapping pictures instead. Tahir certainly has found his voice. He writes in simple sentences that seem to come straight out of my mind, at least, the idealized mind. (The real mind is going hundreds of miles faster, crowded with wordy vehicles all streaming towards nowhere in particular.) He writes with humor and sets the stage over and over to grab his reader's curiosity. He describes himself as inherently a curious man and it's his curiosity that led to his writing books.

Curiosity, that curious quality some of us have who grapple with seemingly endless numbers of topics. The world is truly a wonder, its details insuperably intriguing. But curiosity is not enough. We must husband it and yoke its energy to a project. This may be the difference between a rock and a man. The latter believes he is master of his fate while the former simply is.

Lunch with Tony at noon became stressful. When he arrived I was urgently washing pans and cooking utensils while the food that I had already plated was going cold. It was a great spread though if I might say so. I'd bought a fennel bulb intending to make a version of coleslaw using it instead of cabbage. I was going to eschew mayonnaise and make a lighter dressing. I envisioned poppy and toasted fennel seeds to top it.

Well I never got around to making the slaw. Today I sliced up the fennel into crosswise strips, added a smaller portion of celery also cut into crosswise strips, quickly fried these in olive oil with rehydrated wild mushrooms, bits of scallion and walnut halves and the result was ecstasy!

So okay I may never have my moment in the public eye but I have art nonetheless though only for my own enjoyment and the enjoyment of my few friends. Life can be better, definitely better, but what's to complain. It's all good. As Hildegarde, the medieval Catholic saint sang, all is well is well is well...