An Ode to the Girl Who I Could Never Write
What is the photograph other than a vignette? A small description of a fleeting moment, a poem yet not poetic, art yet not artistic, aesthetic yet not beautiful.
Moments become small collective parts of a bigger story; read on their own they make sense, but they need to exist in a larger collective to become meaningful. A mosaic of different colours and shapes and sizes, yet like a pointillism painting it is only from afar that it becomes meaningful.
photography becomes poetry.
We collect thousands of memories, photographs, poems, vignettes, yet they gather dust in the libraries of our minds and on our computers, only to find new life breathed into them as soon as we remember them, think about them, to make them imprint their influence anew onto our lives.
It is only when we begin to philosophise, poetise, contemplate, ferment, that they begin to make sens. It is only when we stand back, to contemplate the "bigger picture", that they have significantly more impact on us.
Recently, the girl again imposed onto me her beauty, betwixt ocean and wildflowers. Anew, with a fresh mind, I contemplated the beauty of life itself. From this experience, a couple of photographs were birthed alongside vignettes that do not make much sense unless seen from afar.
From the Ocean to Wildflowers
The ocean breath tried to take her scent. The sound of the crashing waves - continual thumping and exhales - deafened the moment so only her name was shouted from the depths of my soul. Internal screams tried to break through my chest, only for me to realise that her name acted like a drug; I was dazed and I could not focus on the one thing that I wanted to grasp.
Death became a flower.
She sang the songs of forgotten angels that have ceased to exist, that have fallen out of our mouths - we could not remember the names of those that came before. She sang the songs of colourful moments, of flowers that bloomed in the palm of her hand. And all I could do was smell the scent of those that no longer existed around us.
Death turned yellow.
The wind tried to capture the scent of the wildflower blooming in her hand. I could not hear the voice any longer, it became deafening quiet with nothing resonating through the empty hollows of my mind. Only the scattered yellow pollen decorated the walls, leading me deeper into an insanity which I could not fathom. Yellow death and stained mortality. I found the backroom where all of the sounds emanated from.
Blake held the world in his palm, a grain of sand the existential frame that held his sanity together. She stuck out her hand, holding a shell formed from a million pieces of sand. Or, the shell could become a million pieces of sand, each containing Blake's world. For a moment, she held the universe (multiverse) in her hand, playing god for infinite beings yet to come into existence. Then, she discarded it into the roaring ocean, a hungry beast that devoured the sanity of every poet, feeding on the emotions that lay hidden in the brush of every artist.
My mind was burning with the fire of every death. I followed the rope that tied me to existence, only to realise that it went on and on in a circle that led me back to the start. I was carrying my own weight.
Postscriptum, or Cut the Rope and Let Death Lose
As quickly as the moment arose, it soon retaliated back into the cave of its existence.
I captured the moments, in seemingly random orders, and I could not make sense of them as separate units. As I placed them onto the canvas, the colours seemed to merge and form a unit, united by their difference.
Yet it still did not make sense to a rational mind.
Alas, we can attempt to capture the moment, but it will always become fleeting desires that recede further the harder we try to grasp them.
For now, happy photographing, and keep well.
All of the musings and writings are my own, albeit inspired by the grain of sand containing a multitude of worlds. The photographs are also my own, taken with my Nikon D300.