[L, diary, ephēmeris] 1) BLOG

"....the title is my belief that the world is filled with wonders.  All too often we are so busy with our daily preoccupations that we fail to fully notice the wondrous nature of the people and situations we encounter...I want everyone to realize that we each have at least one amazing thing in our lives.  I want my readers to search through their lives and find their own amazing thing, and to appreciate it--and their unique, wonder-filled lives. I hope that people will open up and share their amazing stories with each other--an with their dear ones.  Sometimes our dear ones, our families, are the last to know about our 'one amazing thing.' "

--A Conversation With Chitra Divakaruni--

I have just finished reading Chitra Divakaruni's One Amazing Thing.  It was an excellent read, enticingly crafted and thought-provoking.  When I finished the last page of the story there were two further reading possibilities: the conversation with the author and/or a Reading Group Guide.  I seldom read those sections, preferring to first work out in my own head the questions and thoughts I might have had while reading, so often just close the book then, or come back later.  I'm glad I didn’t do either, but instead, took the few minutes needed to read the conversation. 

Divakaruni's wish for others to examine and share their own One Amazing Thing-experiences resonated, pleased me enormously. It was exactly the nudge I've needed to begin this post, so here is a story I’ve wanted to tell for a very long time:

I have no formal training or credentials for teaching, but I’ve always loved sharing with anyone what I’ve learned on my own, but especially with children.  So, the ‘open classroom’ of One Candle Schoolhouse was a grandiose description for simply providing a huge variety of books and supplies to a bunch of age-varying kids, then winging it on telling them how to use them each Saturday.  During ‘Summer School’ it was three days of improvisation. 

I did have a basic tenet, though: for any project begun, they would then have to use it as the basis for another learning experience--in another medium, and then again.  Three separate-but-connected, evolutionary, projects.

However, providing so much freedom of choice and materials, I had discovered, was unusual and problematic for the rural Filipino children of my community.  They’d had neither the educational exposure of how to use them, or the cultural permission to be personally creative. These student’s traditional methods of obtaining an education were by memorizing, copying, and then mechanically repeating information by rote.  Drawing a tree or a flower didn’t mean finding and drawing a real object themselves, it meant reproducing a popular, stylized drawing someone else had done, one that all recognized and agreed upon as what an artistic flower or tree should look like. 

 
So, one typically chaotic day at OCS, standing amidst a swirling hubbub of children roaming from computer room to class room, to kitchen or back, they were stepping over kids reading who were slumped on the floor in the narrow passageway,  they were stopping to help cook or compose or paint or take their turn learning to type, craft jewelry, create Sudoko games, make floor puzzles, use a camera to take pictures of others making envelopes for the blank cards they’d designed and were selling…oh, I didn't know which way to turn next! In that spot in the middle of the room, I suddenly felt a tug on my dress.  It was Reynalyn, silently offering to show me something.
 

Reynalyn was ten years old. She had been coming every Saturday (and school vacations) since she was seven.  She seldom spoke English to me, but always seemed to understand what I said, even though most times she either didn’t finish her part of a group project or did something else entirely.  Today it was the latter.

 
My heart sank when I looked through the sheaf of papers she’d drawn—there were those dreaded clones of stylized flowers and trees I’d grown to despise—pages and pages of them!  I’m sure my eyes grew big with the effort to focus, to breathe deep and find something positive to say; I fought to stifle the discouraged and despairing things I felt.  I was failing with her.  Though it was important to her to be part of the group, nothing seemed to inspire her to venture even a little bit away from the safety of reproducing what had garnered praise outside of OCS.

 
Okay.  Fair enough.  Make the best of it, Diane; think quick…smile…hand them back to her and say… 

 

"Write a sentence for each one, then you can scan them into Publisher and make a book!"

 
Which is exactly what she did. She scanned every drawing, imported them and composed each page with a unique frame for the drawings. She added individual text boxes with descriptive sentences.  Had a student with a camera take her portrait for the inside front page. Printed and then hand-stitched the folios together, herself--with only a little guidance along the way.  It was a great success, everyone praising her work while I felt a great flood of relief. She had finally experienced the joy of producing something unique from the mundane.

That in itself was wonderful, but the Amazing Thing was yet to come…

 
For any project the students undertook, they always had to identify their work with a portrait and a small bio.  I deeply regret no longer having a copy of what it was that Reynalyn had next made, but this is how she presented herself:
 

 

My name is Reynalyn Jandog.  I am ten years old.  I make books.

Here is the proof of it:

...as well as her own, original, artwork:

After leaving Australia, I was still exploring double-exposure portraits with my film camera, a Nikon SLR, when we arrived in the Philippines.  This attractive French/Filipina cruising couple intrigued me.  I was sorry there wasn't more time to get to know them before they left the anchorage.  This portrait captures my sense of vagueness about them.  Later, I heard they'd lost their beautiful sailboat during a typhoon in the Solomon Islands.

When a close friend of the couple had looked at their portrait, she said, "He doesn't have a clue about her..." 

I've thought of that startling comment whenever viewing my work. Hence, the title. 

But I was wrong.  I recently saw them again.  They had returned to the Philippines to raise their son, still together.

Perhaps a better title would be, 'Transcendent Love'?

By the time we met Michael  & Stephanie, aboard s/y WILD GOOSE, in the Philippines, 2002, they had been cruising the Pacific for three years.  Time for them to return 'home' to replenish the cruising kitty and get married.  During the time we were together in the anchorage, we became close friends through shared love of  books, sailing, and lively, meaningful conversations over gourmet meals in the cockpits of our two vessels.

Mark Twain's stories were especially admired, each of us having a favorite story we wanted to introduce to the others.  Mine was EVE'S DIARY, which I was planning to photocopy and bind into a book for them before they left when, just before they closed up WILD GOOSE to fly back home, Stephanie privately reminisced what sailing with Michael had meant to her; how it had framed her view of their future life together.  She said the experience had bonded them so deeply that they would be like Philemon & Bacis at the end of their lives. 

I hadn't a clue who Philemon & Bacis were, but during her brief summary of the Greek myth, I had an inspiration. 

Online, I found greater detail and, coupled with EVE'S DIARY and a short story I'd been reading, WIFE WOOING by John Updike, I realized I had the perfect wedding gift for them:  a compilation of all three into a single hand-bound book, The Three Stages of Marriage. 

Here are the links for elsewhere in this site, and on YouTube, for uploaded photos of the book, bound in lace and gold thread, each section prefaced with quotes of love on exquisitely transparent Japanese rice paper, then boxed within a protective covering of suitable, groom-like dark wool fabric. 

"…The true artist is interested in the art object as an art process, the thing in being, the being of the thing, the struggle, the excitement, the energy, that have found expression in a particular way. The true artist is after the problem……If we sharpened our sensibilities, it is not that we would all agree on everything, or that we would suddenly feel the same things in front of the same pictures (or when reading the same book), but rather that our debates and deliberations would come out of genuine aesthetic considerations and not politics, prejudice and fashion… And our hearts? Art is aerobic."
—Jeanette Winterson—
 Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

The Art Process.  Yes.  The Process. That is so much of the joy artists experience in their work.  Even as they struggle with frustration while learning to master a technique for their expression of making visible the invisible, there is the heady undercurrent of feeling as well as seeing the process unfolding.

While I was joyfully playing with the unfolding of last post's subject (the utilization of digital software to edit cellphone photographs), I was equally conflicted with memories of 'how it used to be'; a traditional old-timer's lament.

Twenty years ago I used a film camera.  It was an entry-level Nikon with very few automatic features.  While struggling to master the manual controls, I accidentally discovered a feature I have since mourned the loss of an equivalent, from my present cameras.   It was while taking three photos of my grandson helpfully unloading camping equipment from our van that, after processing and printing the film, I learned the camera could deliberately NOT advance the film.  Three photographs taken of Sam had become a single, multiple image of a very busy boy whirling around the campsite, manfully carrying various loads.  It was a delightful portrait, far more evocative than any single shot would have been.

Captivated with the possibilities, a new and very challenging process entered and greatly influenced my artistic life.  Multiple-exposures with film required severe concentration to visualize what the successive shots would require from the first shot. Particularly when composing 'candid' photographs, not studio images.  While looking through the viewfinder, one had to position the subject to include in the periphery, dark, not fully exposed, areas in which to place the successive photograph/s.  It took a lot of slow experience to develop the skill for judging what choices produced successful results because one had to, first, wait until the whole roll of film was exposed, and then wait further while it was being developed and printed.  There was no immediate gratification of digital, then. Nor were there an array of preformatted sliders to utilize for composing a final image, either.

I had a sense of 'something missing' during my recent experience using the cell phone's software, and wrote to my friend:

"I love that you showed me the editing software on my cell phone, and will use it once in awhile, I'm sure, but the gift I treasure most from you and our time together is the renewed energy I have for working with my own photos again--though more likely it will be through Photoshop.  What I have to write for the second post is how much I loved it when I could take double-exposure pictures via the camera itself…the fore-thought needed to judge how to create a mood, which is what kept quietly nagging at me while having so much fun, so easily, with the cell phone.  I have no desire to knock the software--equally inspiring possibilities, too, and I want to make that clear--but there was something more that I missed and have yet to define.  Hopefully, without sounding judgemental, placing one above the other in quality..." 

...to which she replied:

     " There are times when I miss my SLR. The intimacy of the lens is a game changer for sure. My last SLR died and I moved on to a small point and shoot. Great for travel. Then I got this Samsung 6 with my cellphone plan and thought I would test it. What resolution, easy to use, I could take huge photos and crop. Oh my! It was almost stealth, too. And always with me. And then to find those lovely "unintended circumstances." And trying to shoot on the run from the jeep --my son does not slow down for water buffalos (my absolute favorite) or jeepneys. Then.....this year, I discovered how "elegant and graceful" the Filipinos are. Who knows what next year will reveal?"

So the process of discovery continues for us both.  After gaining a little experience with the photos taken with the cell phone, and still eager to do more, I wanted to then craft into a single, multiple-exposure portrait, the three Nikon photos I'd taken of my friend.  For that, I needed Photoshop.  Ugh.  It has been too long since using it, so the 'learning curve' was arduous (ah, but at the start of this post that is what I said we artists love, wasn't it?). 

BEFORE:

AFTER:

"...the most elementary form of human creativity (...is) the capacity to add something of one’s own to the common world."

--Hannah Arendt

...anybody have any thoughts on this they'd like to share?

The camera I reluctantly use the most (but hate because it is so heavy), is an aging Nikon D90.  It was one of the first digital cameras to also offer video, but the bonus was marred by its noisy, herky-jerky zooming mechanism.  So I gave it up, preferring to make slide shows of stills, adding Ken Burns transitions for a more video-like product. 

Eventually I decided it made sense to just buy a dedicated video camera--was advised that Canon had great lenses (which it did)--and then proceeded to continue taking individual photos for slideshow videos, rather than real videos.  Old habits.  Hard to break them. 

When the Nikon or Canon were not with me, the only other 'camera' available was my prehistoric, dearly beloved QUARTY keyboard cell phone with a Totally Ugh camera.  Thus I never developed the habit of using a cell phone for photography (...and STILL may not, simply because it was a real hassle downloading my first phone photos to the laptop.)

Be that as it may, a week ago, during our last afternoon together, Marlene, my new (and only) 'tribe' member, totally razzle-dazzled me with her deft skill using just a cell phone's editing software to create beautiful photos. Admittedly, I am a bit of a Luddite, so was leery of the instant gratification factor, but was also honestly impressed with the resulting enhancements. So, having overnighted in Dumaguete, the next day --a PERFECT DAY positively screaming TAKE MY PICTURE (and me, the dummy who'd left her heavy camera in the hotel room), I finally took out the new (and hated) smart phone and began snapping photos dementedly....

Here are the original shots of Dumaguete's famous church Bell Tower (looming decrepitly obese; more benign and stately from afar) plus an unexpected shot of the lurking photographer's shadow on paving stones:

...and here are the resultant images after an intoxicating, mind-boggling, mouth-drooling hour of frenzied software editing PLAY:

When I settled down to sanity with the remaining photos, I was desirous of a simple portrait to memorialize my favorite fruit vendor who probably saved my life by insisting I follow her herbal cleansing remedy when I couldn't shake a recent bronchitis that sounded more like tuberculosis to my new friend, Mar. 

So here are the before/after photos of my public market doctor:

She is advising a maintenance routine of slicing and placing one American lemon, one apple, and one pepino (cucumber--I used organic Japanese) overnight in a liter of water, then blending and drinking the whole thing the next day.  Surprisingly refreshing, it really did cure me within a day!

Later, in my hotel room, after struggling to Bluetooth the camera photos into my laptop to create this post, I debated with myself about how satisfied I felt with the process that created these photos.  Yes, I liked them fine, but...well, that is going to have to be a Part Two ephemeris post, as it was a long (and possibly not definitive) discussion with myself.

In the meantime, here's an unedited photo of Mar taken with the Nikon...one of three I chose to edit next, using Photoshop: