Sunday afternoon, I took a long bike ride—about 18k—which is long for me, and stopped at a beautiful municipal garden. I had taken a few pictures along the way, and now as I meandered through stands of trees and among the flower beds, I continued to shoot.
Then the batteries (two AA batteries) went dead.
Most frustrating thing.
Here you are on this beautiful journey, seeing all this neat stuff, and you can’t take pictures cause the batteries are dead, and you were fool enough not to pack some spares in your man purse. (This pic is of me on another trip.)
After I stopped fuming, I started to think about this need to record events.
I think men are more into this than women. Jeanie could probably go to Maui and spend a week on the beach, diving, hiking, and laying around, and not take a single photo. Me—I’d have the underwater camera, take pictures of the hotel room, swimming pool, girls in grass skirts, volcanoes, waiters, and hold the camera at arm’s length for self-shots of me on the beach looking like a beached white whale.
Do photos and journals (I do a lot of journaling, too) somehow memorialize the event, or immemorialize it? Does a photo provide some kind of historic proof that I was there, I experienced this thing, this ramps up the significance of the thing?
I think I want the camera because I see it as an aid to remembering. I look at the photo five years later and the memories wash over me all and make the experience come back—not like it was first experienced, but at least in a softer, but real way that gives me pleasure.
Sometimes, the memories are so beautiful they bring pain, like Van Auken says, the “pain of beauty.” You know what he means: that which is so breath-taking, rare and pure that its sheer magnificence just makes your blood thin, and your heart ache.
The problem with the need to record while in real time, is that you can sometimes miss the life that is happening to you. Jeanie just breathes deeply and lets life just soak her spirit to the marrow.
Sometimes I miss stuff. I hate my man purse. I can never find anything in that fool thing, and while I’m fumbling around looking for batteries, or a camera, or a cloth to clean the lens—or while I’m figuring out what setting to use, and so on—the sun has already set on the horizon, or the swan in the pond has swum out of view, or the child has run away.
And I can only think of what might have been.
So Sunday, the batteries went dead—but in a sense I came alive. I sat longer. I thought more. I saw more.
The writer in Ecclesiastes urges us to “Remember your Creator.” You’d think I could do that better with a camera than without.
But now I’m not so sure.
Next time out, I will have my camera and I will have spare batteries. But I will also shoot less and observe more.
Maybe I will give the camera to Jeanie.
Nah.
