Today I sang while I yanked carrots.
It wasn’t much of a song, just a half-remembered Latin line over and over and over again. If anyone was near, it would have driven them to distraction. But it drove my distractions away.
I’d spent the morning in an unsuccessful attempt to capture the farm on film. I have less than four weeks left here, and this gorgeous morning was perfect for a shoot. So I traipsed around the fields with my ponderous Pentax kicking my chest, ready to Glorify Nature.
I used to laugh at savage tribes who had the superstitious fear that the camera would capture their soul. Then I met the Friend Trappers, and I stopped laughing.
A Friend Trapper is someone who can’t spend more than three minutes with a group of strangers before whipping out a camera with the battle cry, “Okay, everyone, line up!” Strange tyranny—the request seems so irresistable. One day I am going to look the woman right in the eye and say, “Are you asking? What if I don’t want my face sandwiched in your bulky album between ‘Chat in the Doctor’s Office’ and ‘Line at the Help Desk’? What if I shudder at the thought of you turning plastic page after plastic page of loveless smiles imprisoned forever?”
But by then, I’ll have spoken to her, and she’ll just want my picture more.
I say her—I’ve never met a male Friend trapper. Yet plenty of males, including myself, cling just as insatiably to the passing present. This is not the time (dinner coming soon and all) to delve into the ancient quicksand question of How The Hell Time Works. Somehow we remember Past, we fear/hope in Future, and yet the Present, while being so impossibly brief we can always measure a smaller unit, comprises everything we ever experience! It always vanishes and is always here.
But there seem to be an escape hatch. Say, this blog. As the Gelfling says in Dark Crystal, writing is “words that stay”. In the torrent of Time rushing back into the abyss, I scooped out these thoughts and set them on a precarious perch that you might see them when you hurtle past.
Writing, sculpture, photos, video, folklore — they’re all ways to rescue moments from the maw of Time, at least for a breath. Obviously, I think it’s a good idea, for here we are. Art, especially, attempts to incarnate what already is timeless, and it’s a glory of being human rather than hare.
Yet there is seductive fantasy that we can save everything, or at least everything “important”. If we take enough photos, write enough history, save enough instant-messenger transcripts, throw nothing away, we can cheat Time. We can have at our disposal any moment we like. No cataract washes me away. All my moments are on dry land, filed, labeled, cross-referenced, and digitized, with twenty backups.
Right.
Is it a longing for the eternal Now? There, nothing is lost. Here, even video is a cramped parody of the real. But you can’t go to a wedding anymore where less than half the people witness the blaze of the bond through a shaky two-by-two LCD screen. They trade being there for lousy footage in which the radiant lovers tend to look deathly ill.
The worst part is, you can’t even fondle the moments you crushed in the rescue without using more time. By the time you’re done watching your home footage and getting seasick, you’ve spent twice as long to do poorly what you could have had for real once.
But none of that stops me from the occasional panic that I need to put together a coffee table book of this place before I go. Of course I’m not saying photos are evil—humans must have some records whether in mind or mp3 or else we’d be a horde of amnesiacs. It’s in thinking those records more imporant than the experience itself, so important that every worthwhile experience must be recorded, that we cheat ourselves and make our life into a newscast. The whole time, we’re trying to make our lives better by putting all these machines in the way.
This morning, I got my camera and I got anxious. The chickens wouldn’t pose. My daughter on my back kicked just as I tried to click. I couldn’t remember whether the roll had 36 or 24 exposures. It didn’t go well.
I was still anxious when I went to harvest for tomorrow’s market. The sun was bright and the air was blissful with the hint of autumn cool, and yet I churned.
I don’t know how, but it suddenly seemed rather stupid to go to all this trouble to move to a farm and then still think, feel, and act like a constipated professional trapped in the Beltway. I’ve had such epiphanies before; I expect to have them for the rest of my life. This time, the solution was to sing.
Apparently, a song drowns the mind’s nattering. Sometimes, anyway. This time, it brought me swiftly along the long and tortuous road to where I was, among rows of thriving plants on a beautiful day. It was lovely.
Now it’s gone. Sure, I’ve written about it, but I have no illusion that I’ve saved one thousandth of what it is to be among the most silent of God’s creatures on a gorgeous day. Today was marvelous, and it is gone.
If I could get used to that, it would really free me up. Think of all the cool things you could experience if you never worried about chronicling everything. Or maybe you’re already like that. But fellow addicts will know precisely what I mean.
So I’ll let you go.
