Not one selfie
This is an entry from my journal.
This morning I took a picture of a rose. It is a close-up of the flower’s pink petals with a honeybee close by: a beautiful representation of a daily phenomenon. When I got back home, I switched on my computer with the intent of transferring the file over. Before uploading the photo, I scrolled through the rest of my collection in search for other candidates. There were more gems. Not just flowers, but also mountainscapes and skyscapes, as well as plenty of scenes involving my dogs. As I was browsing through the archive, I noticed that there were no human-centric pictures whatsoever. Not one! Not even a selfie! It is as if this phone belonged to a non-human being who had no interactions with humanity. Yet I knew this was my phone and that I have had plenty of encounters with people. This realisation got me thinking about my behavioural patterns, but also of possessions in general.
I only ever had one physical photo album. I was twelve years old when I purchased it. It was during a trip with some other kids of my age. I needed something to store the pictures that captured some of our shared memories. The album remained in my possession for a few years and I always took good care of it.
At the age of eighteen, I left my hometown in pursuit of university education. The plan was to revisit my country at regular intervals. That never happened for a variety of reasons, including the post-2008 global financial crisis. What was supposed to be a “see you soon” became an indefinite “farewell.” Now, almost twenty years later, I still have not returned, having spent in the meantime more years abroad than in my home country. Given that I built my hut so far away, chances are I will never go back. Where would I even go to, anyway? Is anybody still there?
What distinguishes a place as “home” is the interplay between the people and the setting. If either is missing, then “home” is no longer what was originally impressed in the mind as such. I had many friends from school, the neighbourhood, football, and motorcycles. They must each have gone their separate ways. What I knew no longer is. But even if the rest of “home” was frozen in time while waiting for me, I am not the same anymore. The constitution of the case differs. While I can return to the location referred to as “home”, I cannot remake the person I was. Back then I had no intellectual preoccupations, for example. Now these are a noticeable part of my life.
Some people are the finished article early on. Others are late bloomers. And others still who do not live up to the promise of their talents. Sometimes I read biographic notes about those intellectuals who seem to have always known what they were meant to be. The retelling of their story goes along the lines of “when I was 5, I was well versed in Latin and Ancient Greek; at 10 I was interpreting Platon, and at 18 I started writing my own theories.” Those were child prodigies who realised their potential as geniuses of the highest order. I was not special and continue to be that way. At those ages I was not doing anything noteworthy: I was a kid, then a teenager, then an adult, always doing something ordinary. “I was having fun” would be my kind of biographic note. Life somehow introduced me to this field of intellectuality that I had no affinity with. Just how I have been a metic and a stranger for most of my life, I also do not really belong in this milieu, nor do I seek to become part of any one group in particular. Is this not the same underlying pattern of me not trying to be in pictures? It is as if I do not want to be the protagonist, not even in the inconsequential microcosm of my camera roll. Or, perhaps, I have a strong resistance to the idea that I shall heretofore identify with a snapshot of myself.
My home of old has faded away. There is no chance any of the lads of yore would believe me if I told them what I was doing nowadays. The fact that I am even writing this would make them laugh. Teenage me would have done the same, while making some snarky remark about those hopeless nerds. If my old friends are anything like I remember them to be, they would promptly dismiss this article as an elaborate version of one of my many jokes. I would always make fun of everything. Nothing had gravity nor sanctity. Who would my friends be expecting and who would they be meeting? Those two persons would definitely not be the same. My home is different because I have changed. I now belong to these mountains. This is where life brought me to. I do what I must and hope for the best.
That photo album is long gone. I discarded it about a decade ago. At the time, I was hard pressed to relocate to a new apartment while adapting to the largely uneventful routine of the countryside. As I was sorting through my possessions, I found it in a suitcase and flipped through its pages for the last time. While I still remembered those depicted therein, I could not feel anything about my past. Twelve-year-old me is immaterial as are the others. More importantly though, I could not relate to what had happened then. I was occupying a different headspace, while the pictures could not re-enact what had transpired. It was all a product of its time and place. Rather than rekindle my recollection of the good days—and they were nice—those photos offered a reminder that each moment is indeed momentary. I threw away the album without regrets. It was simply me admitting my powerlessness in the face of something which was never in my possession: moments; moments that I conventionally refer to as “my moments.” Also, I was rebelling to the idea that there is an identity to be established between present “me” and the version of “me” from that era. I would not want to be discovered through my past, for I am not that anymore. And yet there is a sense in which I cannot escape it, as it informs what I have become. Pictures, then, may pose a challenge of fairness. I ask not to be reduced to a snapshot of selfhood and to instead be recognised as a work-in-progress: to be discovered in a stepwise fashion.
Is there something else going on? If photographs do not help me relive the past, then why do I keep pictures of non-human themes? Why are there flowers but not selfies in my collection? There may be something to do with associations not pertinent to matters of selfhood. When I see the face of someone, I do not think of what it symbolises, but only of the specific person or, maybe of that person at the given place and/or point in time. Whereas, say, the rose has the quality of being symbolic. It is, at once, the particular flower and the expression of a pattern in the cosmos. Same with mountainscapes. Whenever I hike, I get to experience a very specific interplay of factors that is unique, though I also relate to what I have always felt when exposed to open vistas and the great outdoors. Anthropocentric pictures do not engender the same emotions. They are lifeless.
About the absence of selfies, I entertained the notion there may be something more than me not being able to generalise them into archetypes. What if I am not content with how I look? “No matter what I do, I will not be pretty, so why bother?” That would be a plausible explanation. Even if true, it cannot be a factor in my considerations as I have no problem recording my face for all the videos I do. There are hours of me on screen. If I truly did not like my appearance, I would not want to have it saved in hundreds of hours of footage.
I have not returned home because I recognise no correspondence between the present and the past. It may be the same for the pictures I choose not to take or be a part of, as I know I will resist identifying with them. They are a product of their specifics. I let them be and do not revisit them. This is how I treat all my publications as well and why I do them alla prima: they are bound to their moment. I leave them to their own fate while I do the same for myself, following my path wherever it leads me.