March 6th, 2007 : A Camera Is
A camera is the necessity to capture the awed beauty of the world where you travel. And yet, a camera is the flow, the distraction from experience. A miniature view of the vast expanse that is not capturable. A two-dimensional imitation of a vivid three-dimensional universe. It steals your eyes from where you should be looking and captures them along with the picture it takes. Then, while that captured image lingers or lasts on in tangible form, the memory fades from under exposure. Not long enough did the film of the eyes take in light to produce the desired image. Instead rather the camera’s memory becomes your own, the picture on the wall becomes engraved into the mind. The camera is the means of prolonging what we cannot retain. Prolonging that which fades with time, while cutting down the time it takes to fade.
A camera is the enabler and dehibilitator. It allows for creation of memory, but threatens to take it all over. But then, when time has taken it’s toll and has eaten it all away, then the vision of the impostor regenerates that which was taken for lost. It slides away the cobwebs and shows you that not all has yet disappeared. Times stored away, people catalogued in boxes, entire countries compacted into folders. Thousands of images in albums and boxes, perhaps millions of photos in your hand. Ever held on to, in hopes that we will never forget.
Yet we do forget even to the point that we don’t even remember what it is we have forgotten, until once again we venture into that land. The secret place where the fountain of memory bubbles out of fading images back into our minds eye. And even though regrets stem forth, of not absorbing as fully that which was real, we continue to rest in comfort, knowing that we can remember forever, because of the camera which is our necessity.