As I am wont to do, I jumbled words around in my head attempting to praise the beauty and the artist who painted this serenely soul-scorching scene and in a haphazard twist of clumsy luck and a smattering of AP lit experience, I composed what I am convinced is my most heartfelt and eloquent poem. I proceeded to immediately forget it.
There wasn’t a napkin on my lap and, as I had not entered any version of a career yet, the pen that predominates my shirt pocket these days had yet to become a staple of my wardrobe. I’m fairly certain that my phone was dead and, as my wife can attest, my overall ability to remember any given sequence of words (or numbers, I’ve found) is on par with a racoon having a stroke. All of the words I had composed fell out of the back of my head and probably puddled somewhere between the cheap faux leather of the seat and my beltline.
There have been countless attempts to re-create that prose since then, all failed and all more frustrating than fruitful. For the longest time, the main emotion that I linked to that experience was one of irritation and a sensation of lost treasure. My mind wanders back to that flight and does everything in its limited power to piece together specific light fragments hitting the jut of a cloud back and hoping that the mental image strikes the flint of my forgotten sonnet.
As is my bent, this fixation turned to reflection. Realization flitted in fitful spurts and eventually seeped in the groundwater of my perception of this tendency to attach specific and regretful sentiment to the images, the expressions, the explosion of color and sound and emotion that I had failed to capture. This could be in any medium, whether I had not swung the pen mightily enough to regale a reader with the majesty of a mountaintop or If I had not painted a friends face with a camera, lit by healthy firelight as they listened to a story and laughed. Small things and large things that I had let pass me by without a concrete memento began to pile up in my remorse cabinet, which was overflowing with the vexation of a life not documented and fixated in its proper place.
It is most likely not a stretch to say that many feel similarly in this regard. Life is a precious gift from God and there is almost a pressure to prove to ourselves and those around us that we are appreciating it with accordant zest. The motive has the capacity to be pure and lining up with the original intent of creation to be a window through which we see the creative beauty of God. It can often and easily be remade into our own self-sycophantic abyss that both consumes itself and feeds itself. My motives in wanting to remember a key anthem that was inspired by nature could not be completely extricated from my desire to share it with others and the subsequent praise received for my wordsmithery. Many pictures I’ve taken are less about the subject in the lens and more about showcasing the skill or perceived unique personal nature of the idiot holding the camera. My aim in capturing a moment has transitioned from glorifying the scene/person/moment and more about becoming a captor of a thing of beauty. The words I wield can treacherously become shackles to bind the moment to my whimsy and personal gain, the portrait I paint (with light or liquid or other) can easily become a cell for the subject within.
Qualification: I do not denounce the act of marking time and moments with man-made tools, language being one of them. There is much to be said for the act of sharing and remembering the times and places and people who have impacted our lives greatly, and in its right place, the art of remembering can be beautiful and wholesome. The best way that I can describe my thought is to steal someone else’s. Pervasive commercialism aside, the movie “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” carries the essence of my thought best. When the character of Sean O’Connell has the opportunity to snap an exquisitely rare photo of an elusive snow leopard, he disregards the camera and addresses the protagonist. “If I like a moment, I mean; me, personally… I don’t like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it. Right there… Right here.” In a similar vein, we can see what the book of Ecclesiastes has to say of it in chapter 3, vs 11 “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live.”
I am letting that sunset go. The memory of it will be a happy one from now on. I will stop grasping for ties and mental hooks that may give me a handhold on the words I strung together in that moment and simply remember the glow blushing off the upturned clouds. Everything is beautiful in its time; and if my hubris and self-made sharing empire obstruct the intrinsic beauty of the thing I intend to capture, then it must be my duty to dismantle my empire and only use my words and my lens as a mode to remember, not to take ownership of it.
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