The meaning of Second Life? Finally,… I get it.

Second Life, Linden Labs’ massive multiplayer online role playing game – the game that isn’t a game – has been around for a long time now. My “avatar”, Cuchulain Graves, is ten years old, which makes him positively geriatric, and, sadly, no wiser for his years. But his logins still work, his belongings and bank balance are intact. Everything is as it was since last time he briefly checked in, years ago. He’s not aged at all of course, looks about twenty five. As a timeless projection of my inner self, I’m fond of him, though it’s hard to say why.

But now I think I finally get it.

Cuchulain opened a few shops in the early days, stocked my novels, but nobody came because there’s no market for books in the virtual world. So he built a space-ship instead and blasted off into the upper layers of the multi-verse, a place free of scripts and server lag. Claim to fame? He was once interviewed for a pretentious three part blog-series on the life of an unknown scribe. The interviewer was a certain Eileanne Odisarke, a curious cross gendered alt, whose own adventures pretty much reflected Cuchulain’s.

Wandering aimlessly that early Second Life universe, they encountered many an eccentric soul: academics, psychologists, hippies, drunks and other cyber-utopians. But they’ve all gone now. The times in-world are spent alone these days, among vast shopping malls, entirely empty, or plodding roads that lead both to and from nowhere. It’s a lonely place, especially for one identifying as male – better to engross oneself in simply building stuff than to expect much by way of meaningful encounters, or perhaps Cuchulain is simply as misanthropic as his alter ego. Or is he mine? I forget.

Second life denizens take pleasure mostly in dressing up and dancing, also flirting and “cyber sex”. But it seems an isolated business. I mean, who are these people, really, sitting behind computer screens, and why aren’t they out dressing up, dancing, flirting and having sex,… for real? Why would one prefer the imagined over reality, unless any meaningful reality is denied them somehow? Or am I simply over thinking, and none of it means anything at all? That is the question!

It’s still interests me, psychologically, but no one else is seeing it in those terms any more, and I recognise my enduring fascination might well be pathological. After all, some people see fairies, but it’s better to consider first how much one has drunk before considering the fairies to be real.

That Second Life endures is perhaps the only interesting thing left to be said about it. And I suppose it will endure so long as its business model allows it to. Like anything else man-made, it’s dollars that make it happen, dollars that keep it alive. Unlike real life, where the entire universe was pre-formed without our involvement, everything we see in Second Life is the result of human thought, human imagination, and therein lies both the miracle and the weakness, the human mind being as self-destructive and defective in its thinking as it is endlessly creative.

It was touted as a place to meet others, to express oneself, but other forms of social media do it so much better now: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – all post-date Second-Life, and are better at facilitating mass discussion around topics of real-world concern, to the extent they are now, for good or ill, shaping real-world events.

If we want to get really existential about it, some secular versions of the afterlife describe an inter-dimensional realm formed by the collective imaginations of the disembodied entities dwelling there. This sounds a bit like the virtual reality of Second Life too, except an afterlife where motivation is derived from over-inflated self image, and virtual coinage doesn’t sound like much of a reward for our primary life’s labours – unless of course our purpose is to learn to outgrow such things.

As Cuchulain, my projected self, sits upon the virtual Second Life beach to watch the virtual sunset, it’s easy to see his existence has no reality, no illumination at all, without a greater self, me, to bear him witness and grant him the sense of all that he is feeling. Much harder to grasp is the realisation of the awareness bearing witness to my own self in this life, and without whom, or which, my own reality has no illumination either.

Though it may not have been intended, bringing one closer to such an awareness is, I think, however indirectly, and long in coming, the one important lesson Second Life can teach us,… and therein, perhaps, lies its meaning.

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Doing just just fine

It’s better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and lose oneself – at least according to the literary critic Cyril Connolley (1903-74). He spoke in the context of conventional publishing and literature, but its a sentiment that applies equally well to the online world today.

It’s interesting, writing online, writing into this semi-void. It’s not quite as vacuous as the double line spaced MS with SAE submissions thing which inevitably, and all too reliably floated back home to the total oblivion of the file drawer. In the online world we find there are readers. Some will read us, some will merely like us, perhaps fishing for their own readers and likers. It’s polite to reciprocate, but only if we genuinely connect with our fellows, are inspired by them in some way or provoked into thoughtfulness. Otherwise we lose our integrity and the void, sensing our lack of virtue, will tear us apart.

To survive, to endure, life or writing, is not to judge ourselves by our approval ratings. I think we all know this, but it’s easy to forget, easy to slip back into unskillful ways of thinking. Much better to write for our selves.

But which self? This is the important question.

The most dangerous thing we can do is fall foul of the fallacy that the online world can confirm our search for self worth. It cannot. Some pieces I post garner maybe half a dozen likes from other souls, some interested readers, others merely opportunistic reciprocal “like” fishers. Some posts garner no reaction at all. But the “likes”, the “follows”, genuine or not, cynical or not, don’t matter. They are Connolley’s public and in courting their attention we forget our selves.

The self is our only true companion. It is our mother, our father, our one true love. But this is not the self we think we are, not the primitive self that craves self worth. It is the self that recognises, above all it’s thinking, there is a wiser and all seeing self, who is the watcher of our thoughts. This is the timeless self who grants us the awareness we are even thinking at all, and it is this self for whom we write.

This is the self, symbolised if you like by the archetype of the stern but fatherly English teacher, marker of all our essays, whose approval is hard won but worth the effort. The silence of the void is irrelevant then if we can but open up the channel between who we think we are, and the silent watcher. The silent watcher knows when we have grasped something vital, and we are rewarded, irrespective of the usual forms of approval.

We do not write online to make money, or become famous. I’m sorry if you aspire to writing for a living, and live still in hope of an email from one of the big six, inviting you to partake of white-toothed celebrity, but there we are. You would be better to choose more lucrative work – almost anything will be more lucrative than writing. Yes, you will suffer much by way of humiliation at the hands of  Philistines, but nothing so dehumanising as the quest for gold in a world where there is none. We write to seek the reflective pings of like minded souls, but primarily we seek a way back to the silent watcher whose approval alone has the power to still the existential storm, and to grant us the biggest prize of all: that regardless of our circumstances, we feel comfortable in our own skins.

It’s disturbing to contemplate the possibility we are alone in life and our lives don’t matter. Writerly types, arty types are more vulnerable than most to judging their value as human beings through the reaction to their work, and at some point if we are not to go insane we must come the revelation that actually it’s true: we don’t matter at all, that the world can manage very well without us, or even without ever having heard our name.

To make peace with that is the challenge of the individual life. We must each cross the existential wilderness alone, and there is no guide other than to seek the stillness within ourselves, and eventually then we will hear the voice that tells us – you know what?

Actually, we’re doing just fine.

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On my Bookshelf – Enduring Love (1997) – Ian McEwan

I find Ian McEwan’s novels accessible on a number of levels, like the skins of an onion. You can read him superficially as the writer of intriguing and imaginative stories peopled by entirely believable characters, or you can peel back a few layers and read more deeply about the whys and wherefores of the human condition. And you can keep on peeling back as deep as you like, or in some cases as deep as you dare.

With Enduring Love though I stepped in a puddle early on, was completely wrong footed, possibly because of my own inner workings, but partly also on account of some quite deliberately laid plot red herrings that had me thinking too deeply, or not,.. maybe.

The opening is dramatic enough – innocent strangers drawn suddenly together by a bizarre ballooning accident in which the protagonists leap onto the ropes of a fast ascending balloon in order to save the lives of the balloonist and a child tossed senseless by freak winds. The balloon passengers escape but the would be rescuers hang on to the ropes a moment too long and are carried upwards, each then letting go as the ground falls away and their nerve fails, landing shaken but unhurt – all except for one man carried too high and hanging on until the last, when he falls to his death.

Had all rescuers hung on, the death might have been prevented, or they might all have died. Who knows? But with this opening scene McEwan raises questions about our fallibility and how the every day actions of innocent people can have profoundly disturbing consequences for both themselves and others.

The main protagonist – one of the would-be rescuers – Joe Rose, is a science writer and a deeply rational man. He’s also conflicted, not just by the incident and his involvement in it and his feelings of guilt at the man’s death, but by his job which he has come to see as a parasitic profession when what he really wants is to be a scientist doing real pioneering work instead of just writing up the discoveries of others. After the accident, another of the rescuers, Jed Parry, a young man of almost messianic religious beliefs, begins to stalk Joe, speaking of loving him and wanting to bring Joe to God.

This is where I was legged up by the story, suspecting Joe Rose of being that most sneaky of plot devices, the unreliable narrator, and Parry’s obsessive stalking as basically an invention of Joe’s, that Parry’s coming was in effect a manifestation of Joe’s unresolved inner spirituality come to break his rational materialism which was souring his life. Anything else and the story would for me have simply been a thriller – about an unhinged stalker and how nobody believes his victim until it’s too late. This seemed a little too prosaic, so I congratulated myself on spotting the deceit early on.

More fool me!

Parry leaves frantic messages on Joe’s answer machine – but Joe deletes them so he cannot offer them as proof of Parry’s maniacal fervour. Parry writes long letters to Joe, but Joe’s wife remarks the handwriting is similar to Joe’s. Parry waits, rain and shine outside Joe’s apartment, but always slinks away when there is a chance Joe’s wife might spot him. Joe complains to the police but, like his wife, they think he’s deluded – no one else has seen Parry.

In this light we view Joe’s dogged pursuit of the facts only as an accumulation of evidence of his own dangerous unravelling. As his paranoia deepens, the cracks begun to show in his marriage – he irrationally suspects his wife of an affair, they argue, fall apart. Finally, convinced of the possibly imaginary Parry’s malign intent, Joe acquires a gun.

But then it turns out Joe was right all along, the we, the reader, Joe’s wife and the police were all wrong, that Parry was outrageously – though not altogether convincingly – real and dangerous, taking Joe’s wife hostage and ushering in a tense thriller-like finale.

Hmmm,… weird!

You’ll find lots of revision notes and crib sheets online about Enduring Love. This suggests it’s been pored over quite a bit by critics and lit students over the years. They’ve turned it inside out torn it apart line by line for its essential meaning but I can’t find any that work with the premise Parry’s stalking was imaginary. The Enduring love of the title, the notes tell me, can be seen as the enduring love of Joe and his wife who eventually muddle through to a happy ending, also the love that Parry professes for Joe, but I’m confused by both of these since the former pretty much fell apart except for a rather unconvincing end-notes denouement, while the latter was clearly delusional.

What would have made more sense to me was for the enduring love to have been that of the love of God Parry professed to be bringing to Joe, that in spite of Joe’s hard headed rationalism, there was something of the spirit abiding all the while in him, in all of us waiting, enduring, attempting all the while to temper his egoic materialism, which his wife described at one point as the “new fundamentalism”. This was a novel about the conflict for the soul of mankind, the fight between materialism and spirit, however you want to define it, and then suddenly,… it wasn’t. Joe’s ego, his materialism, scientific materilaism won out to an altogether more bleakly trite conclusion.

Okay, I was wrong about much of what I read, but then there’s a lot about literature I never got, at least according to the Spark Notes and my grade D “O” Level in the subject (Ha! The fools). Still, should we always accept verbatim what others think? It depends who they are, I suppose. It can be useful as a guide when mulling over a piece of work, but I find the critiques are better read afterwards, in case they colour our expectations too much and render us blind to what our own minds are capable of taking away. I can only say there’s something deeply strange about Enduring Love, but that’s no bad thing.

A terrifically engaging book that really made me think! I got a lot out of reading it, even though it turns out most of that, like Parry’s fervour, was delusional in the end.

 

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Until the music calls us home

The waking world is strange again today.
I rise a man unseen and old and grey,
The shrill alarm resisted to the last.
My eyes in waning darkness glimpse untold
The colour of lost dreams and turns to dust,
The ghosts of things I can no longer hold.

Strange too the look of faces as they pass.
They see perhaps the mark of one who’s danced
Upon that midnight green beneath the trees,
With Fancy for his bride whose gossamer touch
Holds all who’ve known her, and with queenly ease,
Captures the heart that quails, and feels too much.

Mornings like this I see a world spread thin,
Its promises grown weak, its sunlight dimmed
To cast its spectral shadows on the walls –
The things and thoughts I once pursued in vain.
But now I know there’s nothing there at all,
And sooner would I sleep than wake again.

I am a step removed and move unknown,
Lost now to all who knew me as their own.
Thoughts turn to things unseen yet seeming real.
Faint music heard at dusk calls my return,
To dance again and then once more to feel,
The beat of Fancy’s heart, from whom I learn

The soul of one who hesitates to cross
The threshold of this world laments its loss.
It lingers at the edge of what is known,
Guilt wracked by its own strangeness crouching low,
Outcast from its own dreaming and alone,
Marks time until the music calls us home.

 

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Meditating naked

Apologies for the tacky title. I’m speaking metaphorically of course. What I mean is you don’t need anything to meditate, other than the stuff you were born with. But if you buy a book on it, particularly a western one, it’s inevitable they’re going to try to sell you some junk, after all, they sold you the book for starters, so why stop there? There are all those guided meditation tapes, incense sticks, various “sacred objects”, special clothing, crystals, mats, gongs, and then there’s all that cool traditional Tibetan stuff as well – the beads the bangles and the singing bowls.

Yes, there are bowls that sing!

I bought one, which isn’t exactly setting a good example for what I have to say, but I was curious about them. Mine’s pictured above, a pretty little thing, made in Nepal from an alloy of copper, tin and zinc and iron. It’s called panchalonga and it has curious properties, but nothing mysterious. Humans have been making bells with it for a long time, because it rings and sustains vibration really well.

When you rub a stick around the outside of the bowl, the tiny vibrations become amplified, building up to the resonant frequency of the bowl. It’s the same effect as rubbing a wet finger around the rim of a wine glass, but fortunately a lot easier to produce. The sound can be quite loud, and fluctuates between two distinct tones as the bowl changes shape and flips from one node to the other.

To use a singing bowl you get comfy and, as with any meditation, focus down on the breath. You hold the bowl in one hand and find a position where you can comfortably make it sing with the stick in the other. Focusing on the pressure and the speed needed to get it to sing nicely is an excellent way of shutting out other thoughts. Too much pressure, and the sound is too loud, the vibrations make the stick chatter and screech around the outside, too little and the sound fades to nothing.

There’s also the effect of the sound itself, which, if you can go with it, coaxes the frequency of the “brain waves” into the alpha range. This is the same as REM sleep, where the brain goes for rest and repair. That’s the idea anyway, and well worth experimenting with. My own experience however has been that the sound is like a beacon to those who would disturb your meditation by bursting in and asking what the Hell’s that weird noise? or oh that’s cool, and can I have a go? If you’re seeking an Alpha trip you’re better with a binaural beats app or a tape of shamanic drumming – through earpieces of course. But that’s more paraphernalia.

My objection to paraphernalia is this: there’s a danger of developing a dependence upon it. What if you want to meditate when you’ve not got your singing bowl handy? Props are useful for putting you into a relaxed frame of mind, but one of the outcomes of the Western malaise – that toxic blend of stress, anxiety and depression, is the manifestation of obsessive tendencies, so we’re setting ourselves up from the outset with the means of our own defeat: I want to meditate, but I can’t because everything has to be just so,… and it isn’t.

I still like my singing bowl, and look forward to using it more often.

But mediation is still best done naked!

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Revelations from Paradise

It’s a difficult period to bear witness to, at least for one who’s always had a naive faith in the idea western society would, by dint of superior economic, moral and social models, continue to thrive. I never once thought the opposite was more likely true, until that is until the coming of this lost decade when it seems we have been thoroughly undermined by our own avarice.

Everything real is broken now. You might not notice it as you walk the consumerist delusion of London’s Oxford Street, the Capital seeming as prosperous as ever, but walk any other street, especially in the North, and you’ll understand where the pain is being felt, and why. Here, there has been no recovery from the crash of 2008 and now, a decade, on we are entirely disabused of the notion there will ever be one. That the poorest would one day be reliant upon charitable handouts of food, even those in work, would once have been beyond imagining. Now it’s normal.

I’m approaching retirement from a profession on its uppers, but it’ll see me out, and I have the cushion of one of the last final salaried pension schemes to take me into old age, so I write from a somewhat detached perspective, neither rich nor poor, but anyone with compassion cannot but be moved by what they see about them. And anyone with children cannot but be alarmed for their prospects.

My life began in a working class family, sustained by my father’s energy and intellect. In the mines he worked his way up from collier, to shot-firer, to deputy. Night school in his teens and twenties, and the earnest application of his craft in the very depths of the earth yielded sufficient reward to support a wife and two kids, a modest three bed semi, and a second hand car. He wanted nothing more.

When my father died early, his Coal Board pension sustained my mother for the rest of her life. It stood me on relatively secure ground too, saw me through the early years until I could work my way into a profession of my own. What I am now would not have been possible without my parents, and what they achieved, modest though it was, would not have been possible without a supportive society, a Britain that was by and large benevolent, providing those who had begun lowly in life with a basic financial catch-all, and a ladder to improve themselves.

This grand experiment ended in the 1980’s with another experiment, one founded on the redistribution of money into private hands. The theory was that, while this would naturally render certain individuals obscenely rich, their riches, through investment, would somehow spawn enterprise that would in turn allow money to trickle down and sustain the whole of society. What happened was rather different.

They entered into a kind of warfare against the masses, also against the governments who represented them. They developed ways of becoming richer, of evading laws, and where necessary lobbying sympathetic lawmakers into dismantling the financial checks and balances created to ensure decent and fair practice. Thus the financial systems pulsating throughout the nineties and the early noughties were already akin to legalised swindles.

As the rich prospered, they moved their money into secret places beyond the reach of the taxman, while industries providing employment for millions collapsed for want of investment. The industries were not replaced. The poor became poorer, and the ladder allowing them to become richer by means of diligence was kicked away. Reliant on by now severely rationed state handouts, and on ever more demeaning and dead end work that paid virtually nothing, they clutched at the devil of credit-trickery to makes ends meet, and fell headlong into a cunning debt slavery from which there was no escape. As if this were not enough, they were also vilified in rich men’s newspapers as n’er-do-wells and scroungers.

This appalling system fell apart in 2008, the result of one last financial swindle that spun the roulette wheel so hard its axle broke. The world would have ended then had it not been for the largely unacknowledged efforts of a former and much maligned British PM. But it was not enough to restore the world, even to pre 2008 levels of declining prosperity, and the decade since has been one deliberately contrived to render the masses poorer, increasingly insecure, and more despairing than they were before. Meanwhile the rich have continued to prosper so much they have begun gold-plating their Rolls-Royces,..

My ‘phone was bleeping every five minutes this last week as the Paradise Papers broke, my left-of-centre news-feeds breathless with yet one more revelation of how the rich keep their money safe from the rest of us, and what obscene frivolities they spend it on. None of it surprises us. We’ve heard it all before. If you take money from the masses, deprive us of meaningful work, you cannot expect us to support ourselves, let alone prosper and pay taxes for the benefit of society as a whole. We whither, and society withers with us, becomes cheap, threadbare, fragile. The rich have inherited all the convertible wealth of earth, dumped the rest of us among all the waste that’s left over.

We have no control over the circumstances into which we are born, and nowadays less opportunity to alter those circumstances as the rich secure their fortress positions and kick the ladders away. If one is born poor, it’s likely we shall remain so all our lives. The rich do not have a greater right to life than the rest of us, yet one might be forgiven for thinking they do since money is life, at least in the type of society we have created. To hoard riches beyond the reach and benefit of the masses is to deny security, and the sense that life means anything at all. But this is not a safe sport for the rich to play in the long term.

These scams and schemes are deftly gamed by the pulse takers and the money-lenders, and all the barrow-boys of the financial temples, but it is a crime, if not in the eyes of the state any more, then in the eyes of God. And if you do not fear God then perhaps it is the poor themselves you should be wary of, for there is little protection to be had from an ordinary man who’s already had everything taken from him.

But that the Paradise papers have come to light is itself a glimmer of hope, that someone working in the turgid murk of those sequestered riches possessed sufficient moral outrage to expose them. Look, someone’s saying, this really isn’t right! It could be something small, this thing, a brief cry in the dark and it’ll go the way of all such yesterday’s news, or it could be the start of something big, a viral howl of outrage to usher in a new, more socially responsible zeitgeist.

It is not my generation, the baby-boomers, who will solve this problem; we’re still too close to the myth of the golden olden times to put up much of a fight. But the young have and will suffer more, lose more than they have lost already, indeed they have grown up in a period that has eroded trust and faith in authority, a period that has equated wealth and power and privilege with corruption and the abuse of the powerless on an Herculean scale. This has been their bread and butter, and they are sick of it, and they are coming of age.

I forgive the young in advance their ire at so monumental a betrayal. The rich, who avoid their dues and bend the rule of law to suit themselves, I forgive nothing. I’ve no idea what the next decade will bring, but as the West stands today in the light of these revelations from paradise, the best I can see is a long haul, wading knee deep in the mud, while the bastions of the rich are dismantled one golden brick at a time. The worst I can imagine is that nothing changes at all.

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Insta-cam bore part 2 – getting out of shot

I fell out with the Single Lens Reflex Camera around the time digital was invented, found myself leaving the thing behind. It was a Pentax P70 with a medium zoom lens. It must have weighed over a Kilogram, and I was for travelling to places much lighter by then, and returning less tired. So I snapped the nineties and the noughties on a range of digital compacts, of increasing pixel count, cameras that travelled discretely in the pocket.

My family like the shots that have their faces in them. The rest, the scenic shots, the still lifes, are all neatly catalogued and backed up but, like my old Kodachrome slides from the 80’s, I rarely bother browsing them. Such is the lot of the amateur photographer, forever in search of that profound image, and nobody to show it to who gives a damn anyway. I sometimes snap myself, or have others do it for me, but then wonder what the Hell I’m thinking.

Mostly I prefer to be out of shot.

The current compact is a Canon G12, a worthy device, at the upper end of the market – or rather it was when I bought it – things move on so quickly these days. I took this picture of some conkers with it:

Why? Well, who can resist a conker? I like the colours, the autumn feel, which I amplified a little in Painshop. It conjures memories of childhood, schoolyard conker fights, the oily sheen when you first crack them open.

It was an arranged shot, the conkers recovered from a pile of leaf mould, and posed, so to speak. I extended the zoom to maximum, and set the broadest aperture I could, given the available light in order to isolate the subject and blur the background. I like the effect, but for all of that, I don’t suppose it’ll mean much to my great-great grandchildren who’ll be faced with the dilemma of continuing to archive great-great grandad Michael’s conker picture, or just deleting the damned thing. After all – I mean – what on earth was he thinking? Experience of past post-mortem clear-outs tells me only faces will be preserved, and maybe not even those, if names have already been forgotten.

Second exhibit: picture of a tree, green pasture, sheep, starburst sun:

It was the shadow of the tree that struck me here, almost reflection-like in quality. It put me in mind of the symbolic “tree of life”, the branches mirrored by its roots. I took it with a digital SLR, a Nikon D5600, with a medium zoom, which, like that earlier SLR camera must weigh over a kilogram again, and I’m wondering how much use it will see, because I still like to travel light. Purists won’t like the starburst, which is more of a lens artifact than artistically intended, though paradoxically you can buy filters to achieve the same effect.

The camera is new – bought it recently. It has a much bigger sensor than the G12, and twice the resolution. It delivers greater dynamic range, depth of colour, and a clearer, sharper image, but these things are only apparent if you’re particular about what you’re looking for. If you’re not, you might as well just use the camera on your phone, which, if it was made in the last few years, is probably pretty good anyway. This is called tech-talk and it always runs the risk of devouring itself, photography then becoming more about the device than the image, and that’s certainly the way it is with many photography enthusiasts. They talk intelligently and endlessly about aperture, ISO and lens distortions, but I always find their pictures rather dull.

Perhaps they’d feel the same about my conkers.

It could be a question of transience of course. It’s possible my tree of life will light up in a similar way at some point in the future, as it has in the past, but more likely the next time I pass it, it’ll be completely different. The conkers are unique, that moment – all be it somewhat staged – is gone for ever, but we can say the same for any image – even that gormless one of you propping up the Tower of Pisa.

But we may be on to something here, the power of an image lying in the unlikelihood of that moment ever occurring again, but it has to go beyond the mere documentary. The image has to touch the soul of the beholder in ways that to merely bear witness to that same event does not.

Food for thought, and happy snapping.

Thanks for listening.

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Insta-Cam bore – part one, getting into shot.

Browsing Instagram it strikes me there are two kinds of people. There are those who see the world around them, and there are those who see themselves. There are the selfies and the worldies. I think of myself as a worldie, but does that make me any less narcissistic than the selfie?

Had I more youth and muscle and hair, I’d probably show off a bit, post myself atop Napes Needle, hands on head, balancing on one leg for all to go: Gorrrr-blimeee look at i’m! I too might have been an insta-fool, for sure!

But to become self aware is to disappear from the frame, rather than the alternative, which is more of an attempt to confirm our existence, and its validity, to say nothing of its coolness, as evidenced by our goofy grinning visage superimposed upon whatever monumental backdrop we find most impressive. But what is it that impresses us about an event or a scene? And why do we have to be pictured in it? It’s obvious we were there, because we remember it and took the photograph, so who else are we trying to impress by squeezing ourselves into shot as well?

As a young man I lugged a 35mm Single Lens Reflex camera up every peak in the Lake District, bar few. I was proving something to myself, walking, mostly alone, a reticent, anxiety prone individual, bluffing his way up the big beasts and around the classic routes. I have all those expeditions recorded and painstakingly labelled for posterity on Kodachrome slides. But they moulder slowly in dusty boxes now, and are rarely viewed. Memory then becomes the favoured means of ready recollection, blurred somewhat by internal and unconscious bias. So much for lugging all that weight up all those hills!

I’ve never been photographed, or taken photographs in China, because I’ve never been there. The memories are lacking because they don’t exist, but if they did, how secure would they be in the hands of old age anyway? How important are those neglected shots on ancient hard drives or buried deep in the sedimentary layers of Instagram?

Apparently, not much.

The evidence of our true presence in the world is more than skin deep; it doesn’t matter if you know I’ve been to China or to the top of Ben Nevis, or not. The evidence of a life’s experience can be measured only in terms of its effect upon the psyche, and the development of individual, and such things are glacially slow in their effect – hardly the work of an instant. In these terms then, most photographs of faces in the scene tell us nothing.

I see tourists armed with video recording equipment, capturing every last moment of a visit, too busy with the recording of it to pay much heed to the visit itself. Thus the experience becomes that of recording, rather than of being. The recording is a record of itself and, like in a hall of mirrors, vanishes off into infinite oblivion.

Why do we camera bearers think it so important to get the shot? Is it really just to impress our friends? Surely, there’s more! After all, there are images that are immediately arresting, hold us in profound stillness, humble us, make us think! But is it worth all that effort and a million snaps of crazy cats and goofy grins, for that one meaningful image to emerge from an otherwise dull collection?

I suppose it must be. It’s what the pros can pull off, if not with ease, then at least more often than the rest of us. And that’s why I persevere with, and why I love my cameras.

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