Aborigines, light writers and feed your head!
It takes a bit of magic to capture a portion of eternity.
Tell that to the Aborigines of Australia who still believe ones soul can be captured in a meld of polyester, celluloid, gelatin and salts that we call film. Even today they refuse to have their photographs taken.
My supervisor dropped a framed photograph of her husband in her office the other day and immediately called him saying, “Are you okay? Your photo fell and I wanted to make sure you’re alright.”
What’s with the fascination of our souls being in this fluctuated state of being that can be taken or broken at any moment?
Are we that fractured that we can’t hold onto our own souls? Maybe that’s a bit much, I mean, it’s just a superstition. But it makes me wonder.
Did Alice have it right? What happens when we gaze through the looking glass? Do we journey through the past, take a peek at the future?
Even in the ancient cultures of the Greeks, Egyptians and Romans, mirrors were used for scrying, or looking into the future. Now, cameras are just a series of mirrors and projections of light. What does this say of photography?
Indeed, we are the light writers – the keepers of time.
I think it’s a way to capture our evolution. We struggle to document the tiny flucuations over time that we, as a human race, are subjected to. So what better way than to instill it in a concrete form. From this we learn not to forget; to not become extinct. Maybe our species was supposes to come up with the camera, to preserve ourselves for some greater generation of the future.
Maybe.
It seems we’re just tiny glass bottles filled with notes to be rescued from our desert islands; we are still so alone and longing to transcend our detached atolls.
Although this idea can make me feel small, I have to look at the bigger picture (please, no pun intended…really).
Recently, a special on the History Channel called Evolve, took the viewer through the evolution of the eye. It shows how dinosaurs eyes adapted over the millions of years to allow them to become great hunters. Many of our human adaptations have been left behind, making way for what helps us find food and survive. It also has some interesting points on how our society has adapted because of how we individually perceive it.
There has to be some greater purpose; what keeps us alive is our ability to see and to adapt to our immediate environment. It’s not rocket science here. But maybe in a future blog I’ll try and tackle rocket science in a complete dumbed down and uninvolved way.
Until then, feed your head!
For all of those light writers out there:
Read: Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll
Listen to: White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane
Watch: Evolve, The History Channel
… F-8 and be there
Leave a Reply