Saturday Afternoon
I took Ev to see my acupuncturist, Jade the Vietnamese writer/teacher turned student/doctor/ healer. He took him under his wing, indoctrinating him into an ancient healing art. I could only guess that all the time they were in the treatment room, they shared notes on writing. Feeling quite relaxed after the session we returned home, had lunch and Ev has fallen into dream/sleep reverie. I imagine the energized chi pulsating its way through his meridians and disintegrating any old blocks. He is a body of connecting organs.
While he sleeps, I turn to my computer yet again, but this time to do something I’ve not done in a pure and unadulterated way for some time – visual surfing. I start out on the hunt for a particular series of photographs, then quickly meander off in sheer randomness, letting a visual richness carry me away to seas and cultures beyond my reach. All the time I am doing this Gilles Deleuze keeps pressing into my thoughts.
I haven’t been thinking about him for a long time. My conversations with the book collecting Steve, have me harkening back to a time when reading philosophers and hearing their lectures was a steady staple of my diet. I’ve put the philosophical meandering and treatises on hold in order to think like a screenplay writer, investigate the psychology of characters, live experientially, be a part of the process of life rather than the thing of life. I want my visual self and my writing/typing self to co-mingle in a rich abundant vitality.
Deleuze, makes me think of cinema (of course), writing, writing as medicine, the patient as doctor, yes that’s it. I wanted to retrieve the patient/doctor duality Deleuze so passionately wrote of, as if he were writing himself a prescription of health or writing himself out of madness. I am reminded of the potency of this brand of medicine, this life line of communing.
So now that I have the patient/doctor firmly planted in my mind, it is OK to leave it and return to my visual meanderings. Here is where I traveled today with the help of Tewfic El-Sawy.
http://telsawy.tripod.com/Theyyams/index.html
Go to the Gallery and make sure you also check out the section on the Motion. I looked at Prakhar’s Dancing Monks and Buddha’s Apprentices.
There is also a blog:
http://thetravelphotographer.blogspot.com/
