Lois Farfel Stark's Blog: Lois' Lens, page 3

Amelia's Eyes

Amelia Earhart intrigues me not only for her guts and goals, not only for her courage to grab her own life and live it in her own terms, but for her eyes--her sight and foresight. She was a visionary who wanted to push the horizon of women, of aviation, and literally expand her horizon by seeing from above. As the first female to fly the Atlantic in 1928, first as a passenger and later as a solo pilot in 1932, she was the emblem of an emerging new world. She flew the Pacific solo from Honolulu to Oakland in 1935 when few people flew airplanes, man or woman. Her accomplishments broke norms, challenged reality in her times like the first astronauts of our times. 

“The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity.”

— Amelia Earhart

But what I love about Earhart is how she used her eyes--as a visionary that pushed the envelope, as a pilot and navigator who flew solo over oceans, as an amateur photographer, and as a poet, who transmuted her sight into words.

In 1921 Earhart wrote a poem under the name Emil A Harte.

From an airplane
Even the watchful purple hills
That hold the lake could not see
So well as I the stain of evening
Creeping from its heart.
 
I like to think Earhart loved the divide of day and night, able to watch it from above as if she had gained goddess powers to ride the sunset round the world. I like to think that she was magnetized by the view from above--able to see life was short, that oceans were not barriers, that a two dimensional world was exploding into three dimensions. It seems she did not want to be held by Earth or anything else.

 
In her last flight in 1937, Earhart flew from Oakland, California to Miami, Florida, across Central and South America through the wide girth of Africa, over the Indian Ocean to New Guinea. The next planned stop was Howland Island, a sliver of land in the vast Pacific between New Guinea and Hawaii.
 
Likely Earhart missed landing on Howland Island because her Navy chart book mistakenly put the island five nautical miles beyond its true site. The map misdirected her. Even with her success, grit, experience and knowledge, Earhart was bound by the maps of her time. The rules of her time said humans cannot fly, women cannot be adventurous. She surpassed these rules of navigation in life and in aviation history. But she was still caught in the miscalculations of her time, the fatal charting error that caused her to crash.
 
I like to imagine her still circling the globe, loving the view, tracing the equator that she almost finished circling in that last flight. I like to think of her following the edge between light and dark, a true visionary, forever flying into tomorrow.

“I always believed the lure of flying is the lure of beauty”

— Amelia Earhart

Desks: Home of the Mind

I think of desks as the home of the mind. In many particular ways, desks are the portals where ideas birth into art or action. I’m not proud to say it but mine is a mess. If our desks give us a glimpse of our thought process, I’m hoping my organized chaos implies spontaneity and invention, along with disorder. In my travels over the last few years, I’ve stood near the desks of Ernest Hemingway, Frida Kahlo, Leon Trotsky, Madame Sun Yat-sen, and Mahatma Gandhi. Places carry their own power. They make us remember; they stimulate senses and ideas.

What can we learn about the mindset of these particular world figures just by seeing their desks?

Ernest Hemingway’s home outside Havana, called Finca La Vigia, was located near the fishing village of San Francisco de Paula. Within an estate filled with gardens, a swimming pool and a guesthouse, Hemingway often wrote in his bedroom area, a space with a bed, open to another space with a desk.

Next to his bed, a typewriter sat atop a chest-high bookshelf. Hemingway sometimes typed his manuscripts while standing up, clicking at this typewriter. Nearby was a large wooden desktop crowded with souvenirs from his life—knives, a compass, a caravan of carved elephants, photographs of women, a feather, stones, two pair of wire rimmed eyeglasses, a leather bound canteen, ammunition shells lined up like a platoon of soldiers, and a large key.

Of course, there is an urge to link each object with a story from his life or a line from his novels, but I’ll resist. It was privilege enough to just stand there, inhaling the scene. I imagined him restlessly pacing the floor until words fell into place in his mind and he hurried back to tap them out on the chest-high typewriter. Or perhaps he’d sit at his wooden desk with a glass of whiskey in his hand, wearing a half-smile triggered by the memory of the skeleton key lying on his desk. We can only guess what door and what reverie it may have unlocked. 

The artist Frida Kahlo’s body was injured in a bus accident when she was a teenager, but the strength of her art and spirit endured past her lifetime, making her an icon of individuality. In her home in Mexico City, called La Casa Azul, her wheelchair was in front of her easel. Directly beside it stood her desk, lined with neatly arranged painting tools: two trays filled with bottles of painting oils, a large box with tubes of oil paint, a decorated mixing bowl, three upright books, saved stones, and, of course, a prominent picture of Diego Rivera.

Sitting on the red chair by her desk, looking at Diego’s photograph, Frida could see through the window behind the picture to the large courtyard and azure wall behind it, framing the contour of the complex. We can see the physical outline of her outer world, but we need her paintings to give us the startling images of her inner worlds. 
 

Leon Trotsky came to Mexico City in 1936 to escape assassins sent by Stalin. His home in Mexico City was surrounded by towers, multiple courtyards, and many guards. He spent much of his time at his desk, reading, writing, and dictating his thoughts onto the wax cylinders of his Edison Dictating Machine. Like Hemingway, there was a bed in his study, where he rested between long working hours. He was writing a manuscript on the hidden side of Stalin’s rule.

In history’s twists, the boyfriend of Trotsky’s loyal secretary was allowed entry to discus with Trotsky a political article he wrote. This young man was an envoy of Stalin. He smuggled an ice axe into the compound and attacked Trotsky with a mortal blow at this very desk. 

Madame Sun Yat-sen, also named Soong Chiang-ling, was the second wife of Sun Yat-sen, who overthrew the Manchu dynasty and founded the Chinese Republic. Her life was intricately braided to China’s history. She has been called the “Mother of China” by both the Kuomingtang and the Communist Party, competing revolutionary movements. But it’s her desk that I focus on, located in her bedroom on the Beijing estate where she lived from 1968 until the day she passed away in 1988.

This large room held her desk, her vanity table, her bed, and several large armchairs circled around a low table. What struck me was the absence of divisions in this room. She wrote, applied her cosmetics, slept, and greeted officials all in the same space. This seems a philosophic statement, to overlap all her functions in one open place. It also seems particularly female—to live life with porous borders between the personal and professional. 

Mahatma Gandhi’s room in Mumbai reflected his extreme simplicity. A white mat on the floor with one pillow served as his bed, his sofa, and his reception place. Alongside the bed sits a short writing table with a slanted top and indenture for pens. This small piece of furniture is hardly two feet tall. From 1917 to 1934 Gandhi worked in this room in Mumbai, the home of a friend, as he crafted many of his non-cooperation, non-violent, home rule movements. Dressed in a loincloth, sitting cross-legged on the white floor mat, surrounded by cotton spinning wheels, Gandhi’s vision was seeded in words written on this tiny desk.

Back to my messy desk. Even in an age of computers, where information can be digitally archived, my papers are strewn all over. There are many categories in my life. I research various subjects, write books and blogs, and tend to business and social matters. The papers co-mingle randomly. Yet having them out at eye level helps me to remember, prompts my conscious and subconscious mind to think about or act on what’s in the pile. I will never write a work of fiction, nor be an artist, nor a political figure. But just thinking about these desks comforts me somehow. It helps me believe that when we sit at our desks, we can figure out just what is in our minds. And maybe we can write or create something from this home plate that will make our own contribution to the world.
 

Childhood landscapes influence the way we lead—so what does Queens say about Trump?

In my latest Quartz article, I explore the childhood landscape of presidents. I was born on the flatland of Houston where the sky was open in all directions, with no obstacles to climb, no blocked views. How did your childhood landscape shape you?

Read the article here

TEDxSMU: The Telling Image

My TEDxSMU talk is now live on Youtube. I'm thrilled to be a part of TED's endeavors to share ideas. Comments welcomed.

Versions & Views

In my solo tent, under the night sky I was alone in the Colorado woods, during a leadership workshop. I looked to the night sky as my bedtime reading. Seeing the Big Dipper, I was immediately oriented. By finding north from the Dipper, I then knew south, east, and west off the North Star.  I could find my place, thanks to the Dipper. 

So needed, so sure is the image of a Dipper, it’s easy to forget the Dipper is in my mind, not the night sky. Before the Dipper was our automatic pilot, the same stars were seen by other cultures, in other centuries, on their own terms. 
 
To Native Americans, these same stars connected to form a Bear. Early Greeks knew north from this cluster of stars as a Wagon. The Chinese drew a Heavenly Emperor to remember the stars. We can remember things by associating them with the familiar. But all too often we get stuck in thinking the familiar is the only answer. The stars do not change. Only the map in our mind changes.
 
Many of us learned the periodic table of elements as a grid, lined up in rows of stacked straight lines to give us a familiar order. It’s easy to think of the elements as locked in a grid. Yet the same sequence of chemicals can also be drawn as a helix, or sequenced twirling in loops, or organized in a torus, the shape of a donut. The sequence stays the same no matter the format. The grid is not in nature; the grid is in our mind.

What could be more absolute than the sun rising each morning? Yet to the astronaut in a space station, orbiting the Earth, there are sixteen sunrises in twenty-four hours. The eternal constants of nature do not change. We change our perspective, and the picture changes. The very thing we understood as absolute, changes to a partial piece of a larger scheme.
 
What could be more absolute than numbers? We are familiar with calculating by tens. Yet other number systems use bases of two or twelve or sixty. Other systems give the same answer to a problem, but arrive at it through another model.
 
The cluster of stars, the sequence of chemical elements, the morning sun, or numbers all give ways to know the universe. These formations and formulations work. They point us in the right direction, unveil sequence, give us daily rhythm, and open the invisible world of numbers. They give us pattern we can rely on.
 
But there is another lesson within the sureness of these answers. Remember: these are our impositions, our templates, our models. Our answers are only toeholds to ever-larger truths. We fight wars, hold prejudice, picture the divine in a single way. The truths we hold most dear do not need to be dropped. They can grow as we grow. We still use the number ten system, even as we know there are multiple math systems, even negative numbers, even quantum realities. 

We do not just live in the world, we live in our versions and views of it. Our answers can work so well for a time, we forget that there are other ways of seeing, believing, measuring. So multiply your points of view, enlarge your lens, and what looked like opposites may turn into variations on a theme.

Shape: Hiding in Plain Sight

Photo by James Coreas

"Nature does not change, the map in our mind changes." 

The mission of TED talks is to spread ideas that matter. TED talks have become a vital artery is today’s world. Originally the acronym stood for Technology, Entertainment and Design, drivers of change. But the very name TED makes it friendly, like a person speaking to you, one on one. And that has remained its character through its evolution. In tone, it is a conversation from one person to another, even when the other is a global audience. In subject matter, TED Talks encompass the full spectrum of human imagination, communicated through personal passion.

So it thrills me to be able to add my voice to the chorus that endures in TED formats. My personal passion has been trying to understand how humans shape their world, and then how that shape shapes them. We can be liberated or locked by the way we order the world. We always see through a lens, even when we are not conscious of it, like a fish not knowing it is swimming in water. The best we can do is to realize our prism can become our prison, and then enlarge our lens to take in more of the world. I will be giving a TEDx Talk in Dallas, Nov 15, 2016. The press release for the event is attached. The recorded talk will be uploaded on YouTube by the middle of December 2016. I welcome you to gather round the fire of TED’s global circle.

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HIDDEN SHAPES CLUE US TO HOW THE WORLD WORKS, WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS

In Dallas SMU TEDx Talk, Emmy Award Winner Lois Farfel Stark Invites Us To Enlarge Our Lens, and Glimpse the Big Picture 

DALLAS, October 24, 2016 -- How can we make sense of the world?

To this timeless question, Emmy-award winning TV producer and documentary filmmaker Lois Farfel Stark, responds, quite simply:

Shape.

Stark, who was a producer and writer of documentary specials for NBC network and has created over 40 documentaries, filming in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Cuba as well as throughout the U.S., will explain this concept in a TEDx Talk at SMU in Dallas on November 12, 2016 titled “Shape: Hiding in Plain Sight.”

Her November 12 TEDx talk will examine how shape reveals the mindset of cultures through time and provides cues to our future. Illustrated with a series of captivating photos, including originals taken by Stark, “Shape: Hiding in Plain Sight” offers a remarkable journey through time and place, from tribal ceremonies in Liberia and the pyramids of Egypt to Dubai and China -- where a hotel built in the shape of an upright ring upends all expectations. 

Drawing on her experience as a filmmaker and global explorer, Stark reveals how shapes such as those of shelters, sacred sites and social systems reflect our frame of mind. Round thatched huts and labyrinths show us that migratory humans saw the world as a web. Church steeples and skyscrapers show us that urban humans viewed the world as a ladder. 

“Nature does not change. Only the map in our mind changes,” Stark notes. Even the digital world holds a hidden shape. The network is the map we impose on everything. It is not just technology that develops. The very way we think shifts.

“Shape: Hiding in Plain Sight” prompts reflections on chaos becoming pattern, opposing forces becoming balance and the beauty of the big picture: how we are all connected, to nature and to each other.

A transcript and the photos are available upon request.

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About Lois Stark
Lois Farfel Stark is an Emmy Award-winning producer, documentary filmmaker and author of the book The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times (Greenleaf, 2017). During her distinguished career with NBC News, she produced and wrote over forty documentaries on architecture, medical research, wilderness protection, artists, and social issues.  She has covered Abu Dhabi's catapult to the 20th century, the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf, Cuba ten years after their revolution, the Israeli Air Force in the Six Day War, Northern Ireland during its time of religious conflict, and Liberia's social split.

Along with an Emmy, Lois is also the recipient of two CINE Gold awards, two Gold Awards from The International Film Festival of the Americas, the Matrix Award from Women In Communications, the American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award, and the Silver Award from the Texas Broadcasting Association. She has served as a trustee for institutions in education, health, the arts, and public service, including Sarah Lawrence College, her alma mater.  She lives in Houston.

Introducing The Lois Lens

How do we humans make sense of the world? It depends on how we see the world.

As a documentary filmmaker, I was trained to look for the telling image to communicate a story. In covering Liberia or Abu Dhabi, Cuba or Northern Ireland, I had to look through other people’s eyes to learn how they saw the world. I practiced having new eyes, open to take in the unfamiliar, discovering cues to their worldview. While histories give us facts, images have the power to reach a deeper truth.

How we see is much broader than the picture in front of our eyes. We organize and orient by a mental map. We imagine inventions and novels before they come to life. Thirty percent of our brain is devoted to visual processing, the largest single function. Our time can be described as the Age of the Eye. Information comes from digital screens, virtual reality, and simultaneous uploads from opposite sides of the globe, or images from space and quantum levels showing us worlds never seen before.

My goal for this blog is to help build an awareness of our lens, to enlarge it, to multiply our points of view. Perspectives will be a recurring theme—how the way we see influences the way we think. Understanding that the Big Dipper was perceived as a Great Bear to Native Americans and what this meant. Exploring how different American Presidents have seen the world through the literal landscape of their childhood. Recognizing that one culture’s idea of justice can take the form of retribution, while in another it can come as reconciliation.

One way to watch these perspectives change is to follow how shapes shift. Shape cues us to a mindset. It frames our mental map. When shapes change, this signals a new way of living and a new way of thinking has entered. The literal shape of shelters, social systems, and sacred sites reveals the way the world is seen by those who live near and within them. The round thatched huts and stone circles of tribal humans tell us they saw the world as a circular web. Pyramids and church steeples tell us urban humans saw the world as a ladder, organized by hierarchy and measurement. Today, networks are the map for everything, full of links and reverberations. Our daily lives rely on the Internet. We impose the network format on biology, seeing neurons in our brain or bacteria colonizing as network formats. Hyperlink thinking is the habit of the current generation, not linear logic. These shape-shifting mental maps are the theme of a book I have written. Ideas from this book will cross-fertilize with blog themes.

A related theme this blog will explore is the idea of webs and ladders as visual expressions of hero and heroine solutions. I’ve long been fascinated by how problems are solved differently in heroine myths than in hero tales. A hero slays the dragon, which requires strength and presumes confrontation. In Psyche’s tale, her task is to dip into the river of life, which she resolves by cooperation and a relationship to nature with the help of an eagle. These ways of thinking need not be gender specific; they are solutions that can be applied by everyone. Alternative approaches are the things I’ve been musing about and will expand on here.

Also, I will write about my travels from time to time. Soon I will visit the Buddhist caves in Dunhuang, China. They lie along the Silk Road. The history of the Silk Road includes human nature at its best and worst. Its story includes spirituality and art, traders and travelers, thieves and conquerors.

This will not be a linear, one-purpose blog. I confess to a wandering mind. The root of the word ‘traveling’ actually means ‘to stretch’. So come along with me as we wander through ideas—seeing the world, seeing our time, seeing how we see.