I found it when I was transferring files from my old computer to my new one, a few weeks ago. I took this picture, at Cypress Hills, when I was still going to photography school. It seems like it's part of another life, now, but sometimes... I really wish I was back at that place. And yet, my memory of that time in my life is fuzzy. I was one of the dumber young people that I know, and I was heedless, of everything. A wrecking ball. But I do remember that it was early morning when I found this boat, it was August, and it was cold outside. An hour before I took this photo, the most beautiful mist hovered over the water. And it was peaceful. The spot on the dock where I sat to take this photo, on slide film no less, with no one else around, was so peaceful. And maybe because of my carelessness, my head was so clear. I felt solace - a feeling that I honestly think I've been trying to recapture ever since.
I admit it - sometimes I think about the past. Probably most people do this. I think I do it less than most, though. Or else, the people I know do it more than most. I'm not sure which. One of my oldest friends is obsessed with the past, and high school, and the people we knew then, and she is shocked by my indifference. Of that trip to Cypress Hills, and of my time at photo school as a whole, I remember very little. I do know that it was a time in my life when I wasn't writing. I spent hours in the darkness, under a safe light, in front of chemical trays where I watched images appear on blank paper like magic. I saw life through a lens. I learned that it's better to put the camera down, because you always miss what's happening just past the corners of the frame. I left school and remembered that there are other ways to record the world, and other ways to be in it. I think I understand similarities between photos and writing - they're both about capturing moments. But one forces you to observe a moment, while the other gives you the space to be in the moment and write it later, and okay, that's open to debate, but I also think that both are about spaces. People, and moments, and memories that take place inside of spaces. The thing is, once we look back on the creation of it, how accurately do we remember the creative space we were in? Does the artefact become the memory? Is it normal that beyond the creation of Blue Boat #5, I hardly have any memories of that trip to Cypress Hills? And that I remember very little about the moments that framed the creation of 20 other rolls worth of images that week? Sure, there are a few people that I used to care about, and I think about them from time to time, but mostly no. That part of my life is gone, and I don't carry that with me. Or at least, I don't think I do. I think there's actually very little that I carry with me.
But lately I've been wondering... Everything that we've lived... Does it make us better as writers? Do we need to hold on to the past, use that kind of thing as fuel? There's a song by Tegan and Sara, called You Wouldn't Like Me, which begins with this: "There's a war inside of me; do I cause new heartbreak to write a new broken song? Do I push it down, or let it run me right into the ground?" The idea here, of course, being that in giving ourselves over to pain, we become better able to write pain. Lately I'm struggling with this idea of lost moments, of memories that seem to have abandoned me, of the accuracy of the memories that I think I do have. Should I be grasping on to things? On to everything? Should I be recording every moment? Is that any way to be in the world? Should I do the Tegan and Sara thing, and method write?
Are these questions just too big?
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