all the fucking sadness

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.

John Ashbury

You’ve seen it before. An overhead shot of shoes, plane tickets and a wool sweater. Worn wooden floors, soft, early morning sunlight and gently used leather boots… It’s often followed by a well known ‘semi-cult’ author’s  inspirational quote, Coelho’s The Alchemist or Kerouac perhaps?  But what is this image idealizing? It it not a planned image of a planned trip that has yet to happen? And if so, what does it mean?

What purpose does it serve and why is it invading our daily social environment?

“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

To better understand the previously described image, we may need to first understand the world’s seemingly transformed view of travel in the 21st century and how the internet has made the world a formally less ‘exotic’ place….

When juxtaposed to 30 years ago, the safety and ease with which we can travel is astonishing. Online banking. Google Maps. Translation apps. Travelling has never been this easy, affordable or widely accessible and, while more and more people are falling in love with the concept of travelling, has not something been lost in this evolutionary process. Has not digital media altered the landscape spoken of years ago? Can people still exist ‘in the moment’ in an age where the present exists in a fragmentary state not unlike the one described in Borges’s Aleph?

Cassady and Kerouac. Rimbaud and Verlaine. Pirsig and his motorcycle. Travellers used to experience the world in pairs and while this is still the case, everyone’s go-to travel companion can now fit in your pocket. The cellphone, a quiet yet loud, physically small but certainly massive presence in the day to day life of most individuals… But again, what does it mean?

In a very real, nearly tactile sense, our sense of wonder is changing. Our mindscape is now informed by The Re-Experienced place. Ever present, the phone and its camera have changed the way we communicate and dispense personal experiences. Why? The cell phone allows for seemingly objective narrative corroboration.

“I have seen this thing… look, I filmed it…”  or, better yet, here’s a photo, quietly uploaded and hash-tagged within an inch of its life, reminding you that today, someone did something more exciting than you did.Here is proof… Captured in all its glory, an illustrated experience that visually establishes evidence of an expanded passport… Does not Social media allow, more than anything else, ‘factual’ proof of an individual experience? Is that not the very reason it has been so universally adopted? 

Why compare stories when you can compare photos…. Surely a filtered video clip is preferable to a tall tale and a shared blog post to that of a paper journal entry.  But where does this leave the traveller? The World Wanderer? The seeker of new things?

When I imagined storytellers of yore I picture sailors hunched over in a bar waving their arms, shouting about fish, or the ‘broad’ that got away… I see a drunken mate at his or her side quietly nodding, possibly bored of this umpteeth iteration of the same tale. Only it isn’t. Because language is fluid and the story is slightly different every time it’s told and that, is the secret of storytelling… Of captivating human communication… It is the transformative power of verbal communication and now it’s been replaced by a static image. A moment frozen in time that is here to stay, as it is, without further refinement.

There is a story I was once told that may be or may not be true. I no longer remember if I first saw it in a book or heard it in conversation but nevertheless, years ago, when photography first emerged, the image and the thing photographed were seen as one and the same thing. When speaking of photographs, humans would say they’d seen the pyramids rather than contextualizing that they’d in fact seen a picture of the pyramids. Does it not seem that once again the image is becoming the thing, only now it is the selfie. And while, a selfie certainly implies that the photographer is present, it now seems to be altering our understanding of experience. 

There is a passivity in travelling. In hostels it’s not uncommon to see masses of strangers sitting with their cellphones, updating their instagram feeds. Human interaction is changing. Images are used to talk on the photographer’s behalf. We’ve come full circle to where the image is worth more than word.

There is an inherent melancholy in the photograph that should be discussed and is all too often overlooked. The image is both a ‘rapprochement’ and a distancing. It allows the photographer to relive a moment at the same time that he or she missed it.

Every time someone takes a photo they are hoping to experience something multiple times, revisiting it as they hoped it was, only to find it is but a fragment, a subjective, flawed point of view.

The photograph is a reminder of both youth and old age.

It is the ever present memento mori.

Narcissus’s pool of water.  

(to be continued)