There are few things in this world that make my heart work in that way where some small part of it, located deep within its ventricles, shifts and dislocates itself. It pumps all the time, but those subtle movements where it crawls to the front of the ribs and waits, fluttering—those moments are infrequent. Oddly, photographs trigger these rare instances. In short: a flimsy two-dimensional object can do what no living person can: incite my emotional defense mechanisms to lift. Looking at a picture I can be vulnerable and exist beyond my own chronology. I am able to achieve the age-old dream of being in two places at once.
These possibilities churn around me like real, definite things while actual life slithers away the moment I peel open a text message. I am somehow always out of step, but a photograph offers a way out: a piece of life is sealed in an image, the image is scaled in a photograph, and I seal the photograph through my vision. I observe things in it, confirm them somehow, and while nothing ever becomes solid, I manage to at least, sometimes, catch myself.
Strictly speaking, nothing is happening on the internet. It is an arena where people recite, replicate, and broadcast information, but the events themselves happen else-where. Maybe you react (viscerally) to a tweet - a thought plucked out of someone’s mind - but the reaction occurs in your own brain, not in a shared, breathable reality. Your reaction is to a screen and it is siphoned through a screen that removes traces of hair, skin, and teeth. Biological debris. Things indicative of a living presence.
No material evidence of viruses exists in the prehistoric record. Certain endogenous retroviral elements in the human genome are the closest approximation we have to fossils. It is not the preservation of an original virus, but of its echo cast through time; if we trace back the echo, we can (maybe) compress it back into something resembling the original sound. The human genome is 8 percent viral, which means that every time viruses have penetrated our germ line we have mutated in response to them. Our evolution has thus been driven in part by negotiating with viruses. They have changed us and we have changed them, and while nobody has any idea what any of this means, or where it will lead, our destinies spiral around each other, not unlike a double helix.
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact occurrence rate of a blue moon because the concept has a checkered past. According to The Maine Farmers’ Almanac, which began publication in 1819, a blue moon was considered the third full moon in a season of four. This concept stood for 118 years, until a misinterpretation of the 1937 edition of the Almanac was written up by James Hugh Pruett. Through some unfortunate miscalculation, Pruett took the Almanac’s view to mean that a blue moon was the second full moon in a month. How he arrived at this conclusion is anyone’s guess, but it oddly became the go-to blue moon definition for many years. It was further popularized in an influential volume of Sky & Telescope magazine in 1946, which was cited throughout the decades, most notably on an episode of the radio show StarDate in 1980. These inconsistencies have persisted, alongside the idiom of improbability, ‘once in a blue moon.’ And then, of course, there is the observed atmospheric phenomenon wherein smoke and dust particles of a very particular size rise up from the Earth and cast the moon in blue overtones. All this being said, determining the probability of ‘a blue moon, in a blue moon, in a blue moon’ defies all calculation.
I was drifting in and out of days, searching for what to do, but all the typical ways of changing one’s life - extreme fitness, extreme dieting, gluttony, drugs, volunteering, imbibing, religion, hiking, marathon running, therapy, pet therapy, retail therapy, sexual addiction, overachievement, total failure - well, none of these held any appeal for me. It was only through writing that I could attempt to elucidate the matters below my vision and then try to do as everyone says: let them go. The aforementioned pursuits were simply distractions that put pain on hold, but the action of writing seemed to restore sight, or at least could make apparent what I was no longer seeing - or didn’t want to see.
Minutes later, when I shut the front door to my flat to head to the airport, I understood that on my return, there would be a different person unlocking it. I understood it in some remote way, like how you know things from watching too many movies. The accumulation of artificial experience can, after a certain point, feel like the shell of something real. Over time, the shell grows into a reference point that can be used to navigate the future despite the fact that it’s fictional. When I boarded the plane, I had a montage running through my head of characters trying to resume their old lives after experiencing tragedy. None of them ever succeed. They wipe out the thing they were at the start of the film - architect, corporate lawyer, failed actor - and wind up living in a remote fishing village minding a lighthouse or starting a community garden for disadvantaged teens. They wind up taking guitar lessons like they’ve always dreamt about, and then play, triumphantly, at a community center open-mic night. The characters find a happiness they could never have envisaged pre-tragedy, a happiness that eclipses all they had before. They become heroes. End of story.
It is sometimes very difficult to know what you are feeling. You can detect movements, perceive shifts in tension, and perhaps the volume of a feeling, but not be able to give it a name. When I look inside my own mind, I am often confronted by a wall of congealed images so thick and gray, there’s no hope of getting past it, so I lift up the lid of my skull and peer downward. Inside is a goldfish bowl full of shadows that slip and slither over one another. Somehow, I understand these shadows are feelings, but just as I figure this out, they disperse into my body and form an additional membrane under my skin. In short, you can be aware that you are feeling something and not have any idea what, specifically, it is: a recipe for madness.
Enter a photograph -
Without fuss, without effort, a photograph can contain within it information that mirrors an exact feeling. The brain sees the content of the photograph and suddenly the vagueness floating inside of it acquires a form, a scene. The picture is now the feeling and photography becomes a shorthand for it. This is why it is hard to say more than ‘I love this’ or ‘that’s cool’ when looking at a photo. Any deeper reaction plunges us back into the murk of the nervous system, where there are only temperatures and heartbeats.
Viruses, like hackers, take advantage of preexisting resources and reengineer them for their own selfish ends. Both crack and crash systems, disrupting the status quo, and in the face of that chaos they thrive. It would be difficult to come up with a more accurate parallel and yet it is a relatively recent one; to effectively peer into the behavior of viruses, networks and computers had to exist. Previous metaphors glossed over aspects of the infection process, or rather, they conceptualized viral action in a less meticulous way. An ancient, biochemical entity required, in a sense, the advent of technology to describe it. This produces a strange crackle in the mind; technology arises from a need, and then its products and processes are absorbed into culture as conceptual frameworks that then reorganize the world. The virus-hacker metaphor allows this mechanism to become visible. Beyond explaining viral behavior this situation reveals how we compose reality, which in turn reveals something else: the connection between the organic matter that makes us and what we ourselves make. This is why, perhaps, information is so susceptible to mutation online. Because we, ourselves, mutate constantly in response to our environment.
Despite the setup being cheesy as fuck the situation is somehow completely natural. Everyone is jubilant. The [Instagram] post would feel like a stab in the chest if it weren’t so obviously taken on the fly. The spontaneity somehow keeps it genuine.
This scene is completely beyond my understanding. Maybe this kind of happiness only exists for certain people, in certain realities.
What is it to remember a photograph instead of the real thing? To know a picture by heart so well and to recall it accidentally as fact, is this really so different from remembering the flesh-and-bone event that also unfolded in image after image after image? Of course it is different, except not nearly as much as we want it to be, or think it should be, because memory is an invention in the same vein as Instagram or the video camera and we understand it now primarily in relation to all the devices we have built to emulate it. What did memory look like before photography? No one knows. No one remembers. No one is alive to tell us what recollections looked like before we had things that could freeze time and preserve its remnants.
Metaphors, it seems, have the capacity to infect our thought process and incubate in our minds, undetected. We are as susceptible to them as we are to contagion.
The most intriguing thing about my father was his absence. There were perhaps other genuinely interesting elements of his character, but none of them touched me. They didn’t even sand down the surface of my skin, whereas his death - not the man, but his passing - chiseled into me, molded me, punctured me, shaped me into something like a person, and to have emptiness bore into you, to have Nothing cause you to grow in a certain way, isn’t that like a breakdown of the laws of physics? A paradox in a sci-fi film where the cosmos shrinks down to a pinhead, crumbling all of space and time?
In an article written for The Atlantic, Jonathan Zittrain, one of the Harvard researchers, states, ‘Sourcing is the glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together.’ When a chain of references is interrupted or breaks, a specific channel of knowledge is permanently lost, and while this is problematic, the internet’s purpose was never to hold steadfast or to archive. If it was built to do anything, it was to mutate.
It seems easier to piece together a life from the 1850s, using whatever remnants of a paper trail and a locket photo, than a life from 1992, when digitization was still haphazard. The emphasis then was on preservation of truly old documents or the creation of new digital files from scratch. The documentation of the early to mid-nineties was strangely overlooked as if it were too immediate for anyone to see. A whole segment of time was lost, and sure, major things were captured, but what about the everyday? What about the experience of the world the second before everything changed?
People remember differently than they used to. We don’t remember things the way our parents or our grandparents did. We curate the remembrance of an event as the event is occurring. We construct memory while embedded inside an experience, meaning the future is already happening when we are dancing at a concert or laughing at a birthday party. We create the future as it erupts in the present, and later that same future will emerge in a different present, as part of the present moment, but as the past, as memory, when a post is tapped on or scrolled through. All of these posts, all of these recorded documents, show a sprawling network of curated remembrances, but what of the actual experience? Did something even happen if it was constantly being shaped for another time and place?
There is probably a generational shift every decade, with the communication of memory, and its documentation, but now, how long is a generation?
The problem is that your life can be rewritten, but the part of you that retains your original (genetic?) imprint cannot. You become a mix of two timelines, a Before and an After, and they spiral around each other in a continuous friction. But at the end of the day you have a choice: do you want to be the story of trauma, or do you want to write your own story? So, I’m writing -
You can do it too.