i. Spark
In the bleak mid-winter, the orange glow from my window becomes a speck of light in an otherwise dark sky. I wish I could tell you about the world which lies across the threshold of my lighted window. I wish I could detail the poignancy in the tension between two drops of humidity that chase each other across the pane like cars on a dark road. I wish I could transpose these fading feelings, pulsing premonitions, from my chest to yours. I wish I could make you feel what I felt.
ii. Flame
Memory is the most fickle diary of unlived truths. Oscar Wilde reminds us that memory ‘chronicles things that never have happened and couldn't possibly have happened.’ And how right he is. What is memory but a sellotape collage of poorly stitched photographs deforming an image of a faded view? It’s the most useless form of truth accuracy, an entanglement of reflected emotion in muddied mirrors. All my life I have sought a solution to standing on such wet soil. I’ve looked for ways to steady the truth of my perceptions.
“The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.”
— Eugene Ivanesco
The antidote to fading memory is and always has been for me, meticulous documentation. The mission that’s been underway long before it was ever whispered out loud was a commitment to noticing, note-taking, seeing the world and trying to make sense of it. My first diary at the age of twelve was a pale-papered passport to hidden emotions and poorly expressed happenings. As I grew up and became more aware of the many flaws of my form of ‘reality capture’ I continued to write, photograph, record and seize the many optical illusions of life in the hope that I could bring something of these lived moments with me. How ridiculous this notion seems when examined! To be such a hoarder of life so as to keep past moments clasped in my claws! To construct an account of days which will never return feels at once an ode to life and a dismissal of it. To paint the cascading colours of a sunset sky seems a wonderfully futile way to capture its ever-changing onwardness. To recreate a moment—a single moment—is a forgery of nature’s function. It holds artistic potential but it can never rise above what it is: a copy, a duplication, a recount of what was.
As a teen, I captured every holiday I was lucky enough to sneak my camera onto. Many moments were experienced through the eye of a lens and retold again and again in the edit room. I don’t regret it, such incessant documentation became the foundation of a career I now enjoy, yet I sure do wish I looked up a bit more. I lugged around more pads of paper, camera batteries, equipment and hard drives than anyone should have to. When I think back to the sheer weight of the documented scenes I’ve collected I wonder how valuable such effort truly was. I haven’t shared close to ninety percent of what remains piled up behind that lighted window. In the pale reflection of the approaching glass, I look like a neck unwilling to turn back, like a man with amnesia.
What’s left of all my documentation?
Withering away beside my desk, you’ll find the entrails of a dozen notebooks piled up, detailing days that will never return, and my futile attempts at immortalising them in thin, black scribbles. A bag full of incumbent hard drives holds an isolated closeness to bygone years. Expired relationships coagulate in 4K, frozen transience.
My unwillingness to share my documentation, heck, to even look at it1 is the result of a strange and tangled paradox. I continue to capture ad nauseam, so much so that missing a day seems like a disservice, and meanwhile avoid revisiting the captured moments. When I can finally bear to look back, cringe and delight assimilate into renewed reference points, like golf flags marking holes.
The transcendent power of documentation lies not in the verisimilitude2 of its capture but in the stylistic re-representation of the events. It is only when repackaged into a form of expression, that documented moments grow beyond their frame of capture. It seems somehow, that revealing shadowed moments to plain light changes its very meaning. Indeed sharing a piece of documentation, with yourself, a friend, or the world, allows it to become more of itself. In the same way shameful thoughts become dull and ridiculous when spoken aloud, unveiled documentation becomes like an artistic exhale. When we dare to share these pieces of expression, the things we hold close can connect to the heart of another. It transcends beyond itself.
The funny thing about time is that it moves so slowly. Life is not all the moments you lived in, but all the moments you noticed. In such a sense, documentation is a consistent acknowledgement of the self. It’s an agreement to living by the notion that yes—you are interesting. Even if at the moment your captured life appears dull, it is always interesting when seen after enough time has passed.
Perhaps, true progress can be made when we reframe documentation not as an act of preserving the past but as a means of liberating ourselves from it. To transform experience into expression, we release its weight, give it a new life, a new meaning. Memories can shift from being a burden to becoming a gift—something we can share, reflect upon, or let go of.
iii. Ember
Having finally gathered the courage to uncover and repurpose old footage into new works, I discover a release of cobwebbed emotion. It seems that capture for capture’s sake calcifies something of the emotion in its wake and that by sharing it with others, even just a friend or a part of the internet, it evaporates to the wind, these hardened emotions, into fading smoke.
The beauty of documentation lies in the clues it strews around the traveller’s path. When you step off the train one day and think back to how on earth you chronicled this far across the land, you connect the dots through your experiences documented. To mark down by hand or camera, audio capture or song, paint or pencil, your life as it appears to you, means to express yourself as a way of life.
To live with the intention of remembering the intricacies of a life lived, provides the means to a life worth remembering in the first place. If there’s anything I could say to you, dear reader, it would be to document your life. Mark down the flat moments and the bulbous ones, because even if they appear useless to you today, they may crystallise into beautified diamonds in years to come.
-iL.
The Myth Of Momentum.
To watch the window as if it’s TV requires a willingness to bathe in silence. Not always easy, save for the graininess that livens the slowing-moving truth in the form of rain. When it rains, it’s okay. It becomes easier to watch, like a wide-eyed kid, the world in alien colour...
The Cost of Being Me.
It’s no secret that we are a conglomerate of our habits, thoughts, actions and beliefs. Yet, in the daydream that is life, we forget that we become all of this one day at a time. What are we but a vague set of words we attribute to ourselves? When we identify with a social group, vocation or philosophy, we cram ourselves, flesh and all, into a neat little box...
Especially video footage. Journals are easier to revisit, but there is something about the overwhelming obviousness of video footage that makes it much more visceral.
The appearance of being true or real.
Outstanding post my friend. You've hit the nail on its head. The act of creative expression itself gives meaning to experience. Most people don't understand that "meaning is not what you start out with but what you end up with." (quote from Peter Elbow)