Experience and Communication

In the National Gardens, behind the Parliament, I found a baby turtle just past a guard post. I held it in my palm for a while, the turtle hiding in its silver dollar sized shell, thought about showing it to the child and grandmother 20 paces back, put it down and walked away.

I didn't have my camera with me, or Decimus, but I still thought about how I could have posed him and the turtle, written something funny, and posted it all here. This is different than with tourist sites, where I have to take into account how my gaze affects the Greeks, and the site itself, bu I can also hide behind that concern and ot question how the ways I situate myself in relation to what I view affects me. The turtle doesn't give a damn about how I see it. But what happens to me when I turn every moment worth noting and paying attention to into an object of consumption for the rest of the world? I risk running around only as a potential producer of Memorable Moments and not as (to put it crassly) a consumer of experiences. Existence then becomes noteworthy only when I can photograph it, comment on it and then share it publically, and not as something I'm actually engaging with myself.

This isn't a problem when the experience is not memorable before I produce it, like when I photograph pigeons with Decimus in ways that tell a story I can share. The birds wouldn't have impacted me in any way otherwise, so I wasn't corrupting something (or altering it, if you want a value-neutral term).

Back to the camera. I had a very clear reason for purchasing it: I wanted to teach myself how to see, in the same way I listened to Bach's Goldberg Variations hundreds of times until I could start hearing the individual melodies separately and together. Think of Remy from Ratatouille teaching his brother about taste. The turtle is something I already saw clearly, something I didn't need help or some filter to help me see.

But why not capture what you can see, what you can experience, and share it with others? Here I don't have a good answer, not something articulate and clear. I can only discuss this in vague abstractions. I think that there isa value in silence and letting the ephemeral remain fleeting. I don't think it is accidental that we talk about photography in terms of capturing a moment or view or scene or person. There's a great risk of sapping something of its vividness and vitality by caging it. The depths of an experience can be flattened out by recording it. Photographing the turtle would have made it explicit, would have given it the appearance of being known, maing it much harder to try to grasp the inexplicable aspects inherent in all experiences, because the best I can do to reach it is with not quite the right words in not quite the right order, and it becomes so much easier with a picture to say "no, that's just a turtle, see the picture? it is just a turtle, don't go beyond that."

If I want to travel throughout my life (and I do), I'm going to be struggling with these issues, and I'm going to be struggling with narrating my life to everyone who are thousands of miles from me, who I won't see for months or years. Thinking about all of this means there might be less photos and anecdotes about exotic locales I go to, or there might be more. This blog is set up as a public space to talk about private experiences and reflections, and if you've spent much time with me you know I'm no good at using even private spaces for private dialogues. So I'll keep experimenting with this because if I don't figure all this out to at least some degree, I'll have to end up choosing between the communities of friends I have and my desire to explore the world.