Finger pointing

Under the obvious

Nowadays everyone owns a camera, be it a cell phone camera or a digital camera.Photography has become like language. You have vernacular, slang and schooled forms. However, like a pen, everyone might own one but very few write meaningfully or create that which endures and inspires. Very often a photograph reveals a photographer more than the photograph he or she makes.

For the longest time, artistic expression involved the sacred. Most “art” has religious roots. The artistic maps our parents knew were often religious ones. Dance, drama and painting were about larger philosophical or religious themes, the expression a representation of the symbolic journey within. As someone once said "Art is like a finger pointing at the moon".

A more recent idea of artistic expression often implies that the artist is to find him or herself not within, but without. To express oneself. The idea of "art for arts sake."

Nowadays we often hear the following. Follow your passion, realize your dreams and find yourself. Every single billboard seems to promise answers. You buy this product and you will get that pretty girl. You drink this soft drink and you will be cool.What is left unsaid but deeply implied is that happiness and fulfillment will result when your desires are met.

These messages are false. The self is not the center of life and happiness and fulfillment are not objectives in their own right but come on their own. They cannot be pursued directly.

India is changing very fast. Values, lifestyle and social classes seem to be in constant motion. We are in the midst of the largest demographic shift in the history of the world. Our cities are melting pots of different histories, cultures and values. What does one hold onto in the midst of this motion? Art can be like a finger pointing at the moon as someone once said but the finger, as we know, can also point the other way.

How do we transcend the needs of the present, in order to create something meaningful and timeless? By needs of the present I mean the demands of clients, the aesthetics of the moment, our own egos and the good or bad opinions of the world. How can we live inspired and fulfilled and not be crushed by all these archetypes, those strange and persistent rakshasas, gatekeepers and minotaurs, that we meet on our journeys.

Is it necessary for the artist’s own psychological growth that he or she needs to be a part of this creative "flow"? Does it even exist? I do not know. Carl Jung when asked if he had faith replied "I don't have to have faith, I have experience". I can offer you personal experiences I have had that led me to experience what extends beyond the physical plane and which has led me to know that I can be a conduit for what is timeless and abundant that allows for life and expression to happen in unexpected, blissful and sublime ways, not necessarily keeping in tune with my own plans or ideas of happiness. To learn to live the life that lies before me rather than the one I might have planned for myself.

It took a long time for me to realize this. That the darkness and suffering as as much a part of the life experience as is joy and happiness. That both need each other to be. That both are reflections of each other and that we are a part of so much more than the limitations our physical selves.

A couple of years ago I co-produced a film in Liberia about a certain warlord. During the process of filmmaking we found ourselves in a slum populated by former child soldiers. Many of them were heroin addicts with violent histories. A riot broke out and during the chaos I wandered off to make some photographs. Suddenly a group of young men hustled me into an alley, many of them apparently high on drugs. They wanted to steal my camera. They instigated a young man to hit me. I am not sure how serious they were. Every time he advanced, high out of his mind I found myself instinctively raising the camera and taking photographs. Maybe i was retreating into the world behind the camera. Every time he came close I would ask him to pose and miraculously he did. I was incapacitated with fear but after awhile some of the young men began posing with me. Everyone wants to be famous you see.

I remember looking at the preview on the back of my digital camera and I saw myself staring back at me, terrified, wearing a slightly ridiculous safari hat (My view of Africa at that time). Suddenly something quite strange happened. I suddenly felt at peace. I no longer identified myself with my fear. I was not a scared photographer and I was not my camera. I was that which watched it all. Later I decided that I had experienced a different sense of self, which liberated me from the needs of the present. Two grim looking men tried to take me down another alley. But now I was calm and managed to escape.

The act of watching oneself was a powerful experience for me. We are not in control of what happens outside ourselves very often, but we do have some measure of control over our insides. We can to some extent control how we react to the world.

My father

A few years ago I was a cameraman on a film about the Delhi fire service. Whenever it was shown on TV in Delhi people would call in to congratulate the DFS for its heroic work. A year or so later I was commissioned by a European agency to shoot a still photo series on the Delhi fire service. The comission came at a hard time for me personally and I had forayed out into the shoot feeling betrayed and hurt. I jumped onto a fire truck and we headed out to a huge slum fire and due to bad traffic, we arrived late . The slum dwellers possessions had been consumed by the fire and they were so upset that they attacked the fire trucks with stones. The barrage was intense and a mob several hundred strong surrounded the vehicles.

A young man climbed on top of the fire truck and urged the crowd to stop rioting. I am not too sure what he said but more people joined him and soon successfully exhorted the crowd to stop attacking the firemen. The rioters stopped throwing stones and began to help the firemen who put out the fire after many hours. With the fire put out, I walked towards my taxi and randomly met the man who had exhorted the rioters to stop stoning us. I thanked him and asked him what had prompted him to risk himself saving us. He told me that he had seen a film on National Geographic, the same film I had shot, and that he could empathize with the difficult job the firemen had. I left the slum feeling deeply thankful.

Work I had put out into the world had returned and saved a group of people, including myself from a thrashing at the very least.

It seemed that what I had put out into the world had come back to me.

A few days later I was present at a huge chemical fire. Bougainvillea flowers cascaded off a wall in the midst of an inferno. Naptha drums exploded around me, sending the drums hundreds of feet into the air, the fire roared (no one ever told me how a fire sounds) and I had a sudden moment of epiphany. I felt I had been here before and that I had already experienced all this, like from within a blissful dream. As the flowers continued to bloom in the midst of the chaos, I felt a sense of order, of good omen and deeply, of benediction.

I like to think that surrendering to what is larger, being honest and true with oneself, despite the good or bad opinions of the world, maintaining the vessel so to speak, can bring great power to ones work, power enough to give it a life of its own. This could be living the inspired life, if you will. For whatever its worth, my mind changes all the time and I am beset by (real and imagined) regrets, doubts and stress. But I have faith, or better put, a knowing.

When we read a biography what we admire the most is not what people did to court happiness but what they did to court hardship in their pursuit of excellence. It’s excellence and greater purpose that we admire the most, not happiness.

The pursuit of excellence often means one has to control the self, vanquish the ego and submit to the ideas of others. To be humble rather than proud, giving rather than parasitic, to suffer through dark times rather than escape them, to know that the sorrows are as essential as the good times, to seek the truth no matter where it lies or what horror it is and to know ones physical self compassionately and truly, darkness and hypocrisy included. Dark times have their purpose. Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves often come when life is most dark and challenging. Like Joseph Campbell says. It is by going down into the abyss of life that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.

The billboards lie. It's not about looking for yourself or looking for the meaning of life but finding the experience of being alive.

As time goes by I find myself less and less motivated to further my own ambitions. I have begun to care so much less about which publication or gallery wants my work. Rather, I feel drawn to certain stories and projects, which often find me rather than the other way around. The purpose being not to find oneself through ones work, but to lose myself in it.

Serendipitously and not according to plan, that's when the glass often runs over and realization and ostensible success come pouring in. Nearly always, there are no laurels but the joy of knowing one is a part of a matrix so much more infinite, across space, death and time, is unquantifiable. And whatever else comes on its own.

Some of the greatest individuals I have ever met have been men and women often living in the shadows, transforming lives in immense and beautiful ways. They live the inspired life, most often away from the limelight. They have transformed themselves first and then allowed their very being to transform the world around them, not the other way around.

A palliative nurse who has counseled the dying revealed the most common regrets that most people have at the end of their lives is 'I wish I hadn't worked so hard'. She writes about the phenomenal clarity that people get at the end of their lives and how we can learn from that wisdom, at a point when there is no reason to lie, and when there is nothing left to lose.

The regrets are simple. To live a life true to oneself and not based on other peoples expectations, not to have worked so hard, to have expressed feelings truly and to have kept in touch with loved ones.

I like what Jorge Luis Borges says

A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.

He who is grateful for the existence of music.

He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.

Two workmen playing, in a café in the South, a silent game of chess.

The potter, contemplating a color and a form.

The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please him.

A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.

He who strokes a sleeping animal.

He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.

He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.

He who prefers others to be right.

These people, unaware, are saving the world.

The word inspiration comes from “In-spiros”. To live “In spirit” or to be a part of God. Spirit comes from the latin root word "spirare", or to breathe. You’re a vessel. Look after the vessel. Be kind to it. Give it time and silence. Surrender. You stand on the shoulders of so many before you and the same muses sing thorough the ages.

Let it flow through you.