The Pursuit of Duende

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.

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. 

Basilica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar, Zaragoza, Spain

Myths, whether from extinct, ancient religions or the contemporary religions of today, seek to make sense of us and the world in which we live. The issues arise from the human experience. At least, this is how I see religions when they work. They resonate with mythic or archetypal situations, emotions and thoughts in human experience. They offer comfort and strength in the face of unbearable pain, sorrow, or loss and help us deal with our powerlessness in the face of the impersonal workings of Mother Nature.

The Benedictine monastery on Montserrat enshrines the Virgin of Montserrat, the most venerated image in Catalonia. Locals call her La Morenata, the Dark-Skinned one. She is one of several black madonnas especially in Spain and southern France. Scholars have theorized about why they are black. There is something apparently potent about black statues as for another example look at the Black Nazarene of Quiapo.

For me, statues and other images of devotion for people all over the world comprise a special form of art that evokes a particular emotional response in men and women. Kali, the Hindu goddess of death, is black, too—"the black one." She is seen as the consort of Shiva who is called Kãla, meaning black, time, death or lord of death. In Hinduism, the major gods often have female consorts that some scholars believe were older than the male gods. They came with the Aryans, the female goddesses were already there when the Indo-Europeans came. I suspect the black madonna images of Europe are also associated with the matriarchal pagan religions, assumed into Christianity and given a thin veneer to hide their older origin. We see how older beliefs are incorporated into Christianity in the Philippines, too. It is most pronounced in Buddhism whose outward appearance changed from country to country, from Hinayana to Mahayana. The male-female coupling of gods with goddesses seems to reflect the basic structure of the universe as theorized in Taoism, for example, the yin and yang of all phenomena.

I am fascinated by etymology of words, what they originally meant. Words for me are archaeological deposits of history and human experience. If we go back to the origins of words we use today we might discern something universal in how they point to ordinary human moments of awareness. We can see the connections between the present and the past. This is one reason that I enjoyed traveling in Spain (we did both north and south now, but have not visited Portugal, the remaining portion of the Iberian peninsula that shares much of its early history with Spain).

Many of the Spanish conquistadores and navigators came from the Basque Country of Northern Spain, Viscaya in Spanish (hence, Nueva Viscaya in the Philippines). Elcano, Urdaneta and Legaspi all were Basques. They lived on the Atlantic coast of Spain so early on mastered sailing and navigating the oceans, initially in search of cod or bacalao. They were not intimidated by the ocean and blazed the trail that eventually connected Europe with the Americas and Asia, and led to colonialism with its two-edged sword. The colonized peoples learned about Western civilization (like Christianity) while losing much of their own cultures and for centuries were considered inferior to the conquerors, a heritage many formerly colonized nations still struggle with today.

Nuestra Señora del Pilar is a whole other story. She is, of course, venerated as "mother of the Hispanic peoples." Her feast day is a national holiday in Spain. The statue is almost as small as the virgin of Montserrat. It stands on a pillar (she is said to have appeared to Santiago to whom she gave this statue and the jasper pillar - "On this site, build my house...") surmounted by a huge Baroque golden halo.

Holland State Park, Holland, Michigan 2008

Monastir de Montserrat, Montserrat, Spain 2009

E. H. Gombrich in his classic, easily accessible The Story of Art declares: "There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists."  

Of course, one is left with the question, what is an artist? An artist is someone with a vision of that no-such-thing other people call art and attempts with determination and great care to endow that vision with thought, form, sound, touch, taste, and/or smell. He or she attempts (essay is the word for word creations) to communicate an ineffable but undeniable Idea (see Plato, for instance) into something that others can then experience through their own mind and physical senses. There are many other ways to describe an artist. For instance an artist is the one with guts to express the impossible. As for defining an artist, that too is impossible. Only critics dare to do that, but most often they criticize what they themselves cannot do. Their art if it does not deteriorate into one-upmanship is criticism which many artists don't see as art at all!

One of the few rules in photography is the rule of thirds. Unfortunately, when shooting pictures the photographer is not always thinking of this rule. Frankly I would have wanted a longitudinal image like the scroll work of Chinese hermit artists with more earth to it than sky. Emphasis on sky is more of a Western idea, Christian if you will. In much of Oriental art, earth is valued more e.g. Muslim, certainly Indian, even Jewish art. I tried cropping that image and can't make a longitudinal image work. I wanted that tree there, to give perspective to the humans. More sand would have been my choice because it is easier to get a lot of sky but you have to be in a really special place to be able to take in that much sand!

The second picture also violates the rule of thirds if you focus on the frame through which the monastery is viewed. But the upper 2/3 respects that rule and top to bottom, too. People can be divided into two: those who like symmetry and those who like asymmetry. Balancing those two is part of the artist's craft.

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!

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...

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 slogging 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.

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.