camera
(Last week I made a promise to myself to start working on my screenplays every weekday. That lasted three days. Now I'm expanding my definition of workweek writing to include this blog, because I think it is important to write each day and to begin to think of writing as a "job" of sorts, even if I'm not getting paid for it yet. the effort to write each day is what's important and i don't think it matters so much whether the writing is on here or towards my screenplay or some other project entirely. So this is all part of an effort to just write as much as I possibly can, like I used to.)
This weekend I stood on a short stone pier at the beach where I spent most of my summers growing up. I didn't go too far out at first, because I am a neurotic person. The thought of stepping too far out on the pier scared me, brought about thoughts of mortality and anxiety and the things that I usually think about, but which seem intensified when facing raging oceans and breaking waves and unforgiving rocks. There was a small tower at the end of the pier, sending out a loud, beeping signal every couple of minutes. I stared at the tower and thought about walking up to it but decided against it. Because I'm neurotic. You know this.
I thought about the poems that I'd read on the beach and considered why it is that I am so afraid. Fear seems to run my life, not to mention in my family; fear of people and places and the unknown and death and everything else. There were quiet Asian families fishing off the side of the pier, and I thought about when I was younger, standing in this exact spot late at night with my father, and we were fishing then, too. I caught an eel, but in my 5 or 6 year old world, eels didn't exist. I'd never heard of them. So my initial reaction was to shout, "It's a sea monster!" My dad evaluated the creature and informed me that it wasn't a sea monster, just an eel. I felt silly asking what an eel is, and I'm sure he felt sillier when he just mumbled a response. "Oh, it's a fish, or...something?"
The ocean holds untold stories, presents the vacationer with new worlds that exist just below the surface. I got over my fear of the ocean early on and have loved the water ever since. But I'm always aware that the ocean is a mystery, and not really meant to house human beings. It is this awareness that colors my every experience. I am aware that it is not just the ocean that isn't meant to be home to humans, but this planet as a whole. We are aliens, or perhaps just vacationers enjoying a place that isn't ours, can't be ours. This planet belongs to the universe, and the universe belongs to no one, least of all us. The universe doesn't even belong to itself, because the very idea of "belonging" is a man-made construct. Property and ownership doesn't exist in nature. We divide up land and we also divide up stimuli received in our brain and label it to make sense of it. And you can take this line of thought further and further until you realize that our every perception is the result of some degree of measurement and interpretation. We are not really existing, just perceiving, and when the brain dies, show's over, folks, drive safe.
I stood at the end of that pier and I smoked a cigarette and I got my camera and just filmed things naturally occurring; a couple of boats drifting through the frame, waves breaking, the tower sounding its signal every minute or so. I went all the way to the end of the pier, fear be damned, and it was wet and slippery but I didn't fall in. I walked back from the pier and found my friend and my love but I was distant the rest of the weekend, as I tend to be, just stuck in my own head and not even sure of what's going on. I remembered when I first got my camera, I googled directions on how to clean the lens because I wasn't sure. A photographer had an online guide to cleaning lenses and stated that oftentimes amateur photographers will not shoot near water or sand or any other potentially camera-harming environments due to not wanting to damage their equipment. The author of the page stated that this results in a lot of great shots never being taken. The author encouraged the amateur photographer to seek out these locales and to take pictures, and if your equipment gets wet, fuck it, buy another. You'll always have the photos that you took, and they could live on beyond the camera, beyond the photographer, beyond the entire history of the universe. I imagine emailing myself a copy of the footage that I shot and that email leaving beamed to a satellite high above the earth, and then being shot back to earth, and there's a digital footprint left there. The digitized information exists between the earth and the satellite and it could exist forever, waiting to be picked up by a receiver anywhere in any point in time. This is comforting to me. And it occurs to me that this is what filmmaking can provide. It can encourage me to step out to the end of the pier, you're not going to fall in if you're careful and surefooted. The camera goes to places that I wouldn't otherwise consider going, but then when I do, it's not as bad as I thought it may be. And you receive beautiful images and they're captured forever and this is what it's all about.
This weekend I stood on a short stone pier at the beach where I spent most of my summers growing up. I didn't go too far out at first, because I am a neurotic person. The thought of stepping too far out on the pier scared me, brought about thoughts of mortality and anxiety and the things that I usually think about, but which seem intensified when facing raging oceans and breaking waves and unforgiving rocks. There was a small tower at the end of the pier, sending out a loud, beeping signal every couple of minutes. I stared at the tower and thought about walking up to it but decided against it. Because I'm neurotic. You know this.
I thought about the poems that I'd read on the beach and considered why it is that I am so afraid. Fear seems to run my life, not to mention in my family; fear of people and places and the unknown and death and everything else. There were quiet Asian families fishing off the side of the pier, and I thought about when I was younger, standing in this exact spot late at night with my father, and we were fishing then, too. I caught an eel, but in my 5 or 6 year old world, eels didn't exist. I'd never heard of them. So my initial reaction was to shout, "It's a sea monster!" My dad evaluated the creature and informed me that it wasn't a sea monster, just an eel. I felt silly asking what an eel is, and I'm sure he felt sillier when he just mumbled a response. "Oh, it's a fish, or...something?"
The ocean holds untold stories, presents the vacationer with new worlds that exist just below the surface. I got over my fear of the ocean early on and have loved the water ever since. But I'm always aware that the ocean is a mystery, and not really meant to house human beings. It is this awareness that colors my every experience. I am aware that it is not just the ocean that isn't meant to be home to humans, but this planet as a whole. We are aliens, or perhaps just vacationers enjoying a place that isn't ours, can't be ours. This planet belongs to the universe, and the universe belongs to no one, least of all us. The universe doesn't even belong to itself, because the very idea of "belonging" is a man-made construct. Property and ownership doesn't exist in nature. We divide up land and we also divide up stimuli received in our brain and label it to make sense of it. And you can take this line of thought further and further until you realize that our every perception is the result of some degree of measurement and interpretation. We are not really existing, just perceiving, and when the brain dies, show's over, folks, drive safe.
I stood at the end of that pier and I smoked a cigarette and I got my camera and just filmed things naturally occurring; a couple of boats drifting through the frame, waves breaking, the tower sounding its signal every minute or so. I went all the way to the end of the pier, fear be damned, and it was wet and slippery but I didn't fall in. I walked back from the pier and found my friend and my love but I was distant the rest of the weekend, as I tend to be, just stuck in my own head and not even sure of what's going on. I remembered when I first got my camera, I googled directions on how to clean the lens because I wasn't sure. A photographer had an online guide to cleaning lenses and stated that oftentimes amateur photographers will not shoot near water or sand or any other potentially camera-harming environments due to not wanting to damage their equipment. The author of the page stated that this results in a lot of great shots never being taken. The author encouraged the amateur photographer to seek out these locales and to take pictures, and if your equipment gets wet, fuck it, buy another. You'll always have the photos that you took, and they could live on beyond the camera, beyond the photographer, beyond the entire history of the universe. I imagine emailing myself a copy of the footage that I shot and that email leaving beamed to a satellite high above the earth, and then being shot back to earth, and there's a digital footprint left there. The digitized information exists between the earth and the satellite and it could exist forever, waiting to be picked up by a receiver anywhere in any point in time. This is comforting to me. And it occurs to me that this is what filmmaking can provide. It can encourage me to step out to the end of the pier, you're not going to fall in if you're careful and surefooted. The camera goes to places that I wouldn't otherwise consider going, but then when I do, it's not as bad as I thought it may be. And you receive beautiful images and they're captured forever and this is what it's all about.
posted by travis at 12:09 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home