Take The Picture.
There are things I have to say. Not so much for closure. No. It is perhaps so they can be laid to rest. Not buried so much as captured. Captured so then able to lay in repose content that they will remain ever so. To co-will them into continued existence. No. Not to inter them into earth or tomb to decay. The opposite. To preserve them long enough so that someone, in the distant future, can see, can listen. No guarantee of course. How many brilliant moments are captured by others that now sit inside galleries of small county historical societies seen mostly by the cleaners who irregularly dust their frames? Or in the musky softened corrugated boxes in attics and basements? But their neglect does not condemn the intention. No. For even now there is a chance that some great grandchild or a stranger comes across the image and in its spell sees that thing you took the time to find and preserve for them. For them personally.
So many times, even in a single day, I am struck by the beauty of the world. Not ‘the world’ in its infinite entirety or the breadth of its majestic history. But some small detail that exists only for a brief moment. Some combination of unforeseen conditions that conspire to pull the light, the air, the sound so that at the instant I am in it, that I am presented with it as if it is a gift, brought on boughs from winged faeries to intimately behold and cherish. And then, as if a dream, it vanishes. Life flows out of it and it blends back into the unfocused blur of a mindless stream of activities we mistake for reality.
No, I think we have to work at this. In those moments we need to pay attention. To really see that moment and all it entails. To bring the detail into focus, and, then, to capture it. In words, in images, in reflected hindsight on canvas. Take the damn picture. Because then we can, in cropping that image so as to highlight that secret treasured detail, in giving it to the rest of the world we are willing it to remain and not to fade into obscurity.
