Purpose

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe....All those moments will be lost, like tears in rain." - Roy Batty, in Blade Runner

Okay, here's the thing. My prime directive is and always has been to grab after the ineffable, the difficult-to-express but perhaps universal and therefore important to share, and to chase with language, with art, or with poetry. The idea being to make it physical and therefore transmissible in some inexact but evocative format.

Or, in much, much simpler language: I have to create things, in order to say the unsayable. Or just to transmit something I think is worth sharing.

So, my question on New Year's Day, while I was walking home, hands half-frozen in fingerless mittens, camera weighing heavy on my hurt back, was: What happens to all the photographs I don't take?

There was a man, you see - a man struggling to take off his blue jacket in front of a brick wall the exact same blue. And it was lit by car wash lights, and the fading sun, and that heavy blue-grey cloud overhead, and it was remarkable, and worth trying to capture, to show you and anyone else who might see my photographs.

But my hands were cold, and I wanted to go home. So I didn't take my mittens off. I looked and looked, and drank it in, and then kept walking.

I wonder intermittently about the dead portfolio, too. What happens when I die, and some poor sad member of my small family is sitting at my computer going through things, and seeing all the pictures I've taken that no one ever saw. Will anyone find and read the hundreds of poems, raggedy but beautiful, scribbled at 4am on the pages of small Staples notebooks?

But that is a side note. Related, of course.

What I wondered on New Year's Day was: is it worth anything for just one person to see the beauty? I mean, if I myself am ravished by something I see, is that enough? Even in a tiny way? I'd dearly love to think of there being a conservation of beauty, or insight, in the universe. That any great thought or image that anyone has or perceives gets saved someplace, like the conservation of matter - or more appropriately energy.

I suspect it isn't the case, and that it is indeed important for me to take off my mittens whenever possible and take the shot, so you can see the blue man, who is no longer there and exists only in my head now.

Though I will say this - on another walk, on a different day, I saw the same man in the same jacket. He was not struggling to take it off this time. He was standing against the same blue wall, but it was not nearly the same view. Maybe the different light, the different posture of him, something....took the art out of it.

Which makes me think that it's moments that are the most crucial thing about being alive. Not years, not even the whole - not some kind of sum of your life or whatever you've done while you were here.

Maybe we're simply here to be ravished by beauty, or sadness, or love, and those things occur in moments. Little glittering pieces of time.