| The Weight of Gloss |
[Aug. 23rd, 2008|11:39 pm] |
I am destroying most all of my analogue photographs. They are too heavy to carry around for the rest of my life, and I don't want to bother keeping negatives and prints organized. I don't look at them often enough to justify their mass and volume, i.e. existence. I also have to trust that I have the memories in my mind, safely stored in my meat locker. Pictures of waterfalls, temples, mountains, cacti, landscapes and the like are the easiest to toss out because other people have certainly taken pictures of such things, and I know precisely what they look like without carrying around their likeness. Besides, if I ever really NEED a photo of a delicate little butterfly on some smelly old flower, I can gank one off the internet.
Pictures of people are slightly harder to callously throw away, especially people who have faded from my life, by virtue of being dead or ornery or both. People I know and love can damn well represent themselves in the flesh or in the glow of my brainpan. It's just nice to have triggers lying around to stumble upon once in a while, to set off the synapses.
There are other things, thousands of things, I am casting off. Valuables, memorabilia, my own art, and creations from childhood. It's no problem to give away things that other people find useful, but most of my memories are wrapped up around objects which have no earthly use to another human, I'm mostly certain. I also feel like I should try to sell some of the more valuable objects that I have invested money in, (cashed > cached), but I rather value my freedom from the objects more than their market value and the bother of dealing with them. The best of all the boxes I'm going through contained six bottles of Liquid California-- consumables that will disappear and not dare try and take over my life with their gravitational pull. Put them inside myself and then forget about it. Which wine would best complement a bare serving of Minimalism?
Detachment illustrated in an anecdote: N met me in Thailand with a half-empty backpack containing a change of underwear and some sundries. Throughout the course of our month-long travels, he acquired some precious little gifts: a singing bowl, some nifty figurines of gods and goddesses to use as game markers, a zombie doll, and the like. And then he accidentally left it on our last bus-taxi in the country. We looked for it the next day, but the driver never admitted to finding it. So he walked away with only the clothes on his back and the objects in his pockets, which thankfully included his passport, camera, spare (filled) memory cards, wallet with moneys, though not his house keys. He was cheerful and pleased to walk through airport security without luggage, and we still had the greatest trip. I aspire to be so detached from thing-things.
Anyway, life before our digital era was merely a myth, no? That's not me in all those photos, just a shell of a thing I outgrew. Time to point more digital dreams into our uncertain future trajectories. |
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