PART ONE EIDOS

Eidos: an ancient Greek word that means form or essence. That which is seen: form, image or shape. A visible form. To see. A pure idea that exists independently of the mind. Plato’s Form.

Introduction

I was overcome by an “ontological” desire: I wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was “in itself,” by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images.

Camera Lucida

Barthes opens Camera Lucida with the realization that, “one day quite some time ago”, when he happened upon a photograph of Napoleon’s younger brother taken in 1852, he was looking at the very eyes that looked at Napoleon. Although this insight filled him with amazement, he believed that no one else would find it remarkable. He became  overcome with a powerful “ontological desire” to discover the essential feature of photography, to discover what distinguishes a photograph from all other images and whether photography existed at all.

Camera Lucida is a quixotic work. On the one hand, it is a work of philosophy aimed at discovering that unique quality, that “special genius” which makes the photograph different from all other images. On the other hand, the book is a novella of mourning over the death of his mother that is interlaced with philosophic inquiries and observations.

Camera Lucida was not the first work in which Barthes approached the meaning of the photographic image. We see writings on this topics in many of his earlier books: Image, Music and Text, The Neutral, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, to name a few.  However, in Camera Lucida, Barthes wanted to discover the “eidos” of photography: that essential quality of the photograph that distinguishes it from all other images.

Eidos refers to the Form in Plato’s Theory of Forms. Simply put, a Form is Plato’s answer to the ancient question of universals: how can one thing manifest many particular things? In his dialogue with Parmenides, Socrates said:

Nor, again, if a person were to show that all is one by partaking of one, and at the same time many by partaking of many, would that be very astonishing. But if he were to show me that the absolute one was many, or the absolute many one, I should be truly amazed.

Plato reasoned that a “Form” is a singular idea or principle that causes multiple representations of itself in particular objects.  Forms exist separately from the physical objects that are manifested in  the world.  Forms are immaterial, non-spatial and atemporal. Forms are timeless and unchanging; they  are pure, simple and uniform; they are objective “blueprints” of perfection.  Forms are realized through wisdom rather than discovered through knowledge. On the other hand, particulars  or objects are impermanent; they change in all respects. They are subject to time, they change and decay. They may be complex, multi-forms or composites. They are objects of knowledge, grasped through intellect. For example, there are countless kinds of boats in the world but the Form of “boat-ness” is at the archetype or essence of all boats.  We can imagine that this Form of is a hollow shell that floats on the water.

Consider clay and the endless shapes of pottery that a potter can make from the same mound of clay. Each piece of pottery is an object that is the manifestation of the Form of clay. In the Upanishads, the metaphor of clay is used to illustrate the principle that everything in the universe is a manifestation of a single essence, of Brahman, the ground of all being:

Uddalaka said to Shvetaketu: “As by knowing one lump of clay, dear one, We come to know all things made out of clay that they differ only in name and form, While the stuff of which all are made is clay.”

Eknath Easwaran, The Upanishads

In a dialogue with Meno, Plato described a Form as the “common nature” possessed by a group of concepts. Thus, a Form exists for ideas such as beauty and virtue. For example, in considering virtue, Plato said:

And so of the virtues, however many and different they may be, they have all a common nature which makes them virtues; and on this he who would answer the question, “What is virtue?” would do well to have his eye fixed: Do you understand?

In the Symposium of the Form of Beauty Plato said:

It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself.

The particular objects that are we see  are not real; they are “shadows” of the Forms. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato described a group of people who live chained to a cave facing a blank wall. All they can see is the wall of the cave; they cannot turn their heads.  Behind them burns a fire.  Between the fire and the prisoners there is a parapet, along which the puppeteers walk. The puppeteers hold up their puppets which cast shadows on the wall of the cave from the light of the fire. The prisoners are unable to see the puppets, the real objects, behind them. They only see their  shadows.  They mistake appearances for reality. They think the shadows on the wall were real; they know nothing of the real causes of the shadows. The shadows are the manifestations of the Forms.

However, a prisoner may escape from the cave and walk upward into the sunlight. The prisoner sees the puppets that cast the shadows on the wall and understands the truth. The puppets are the true Form of reality and the shadows are only a false appearance, an illusion. The prisoner becomes a philosopher or a sage who has seen the light and expanded his consciousness.

Wisdom is acquired through the process of accessing elevated states of consciousness; it is more subtle than the intellect, it is the realm of the philosophers. Wisdom is the perception of the Forms themselves, which are real, eternal, and unchanging. It is enlightenment. The darkness of the cave represents ignorance. The prisoners cannot see the puppets; they believe the shadows are real. The chains that prevent the prisoners from turning their heads and leaving the cave suggest that they are bound by ignorance. They cannot know the truth of the fire nor of the sunlit world outside the cave unless they break the chains of ignorance. They must evolve from illusion, to knowledge and then to wisdom.

The task that Barthes set for himself in Camera Lucida was to find the Form (the eidos) of photography.  Is there a single photograph that manifests all other photographs?  Is there a photograph that does not change, that is permanent and transcends space and time? Is there a photograph that has a unique quality that is at the heart of all other photographs? Does a photograph have an inherent or intrinsic essence?

To begin his quest, Barthes attempts to classify photography but he finds that it is unclassifiable because the categories never capture photography’s essence. The photograph is a “weightless, transparent envelope” that is contingent upon the referent, the thing that it represents. The referent “adheres” to the photograph. We only see the referent, the thing photographed. A photograph always carries the referent within itself.  They are two sides of the same coin or, as Barthes puts it, two sides of a laminated sheet that cannot be separated. Barthes likens the notion to two sides of a duality: good and evil, desire and its object, two partners locked in sexual congress. The photograph is invisible. We don’t see the photograph; we see an image of the thing that the camera converts into the image. The photograph is transparent, invisible; it is empty, it is merely a container.

Barthes turns to Buddhism for inspiration. To designate reality, Barthes writes, Buddhism says sunya, the void; but better still: tathata, as Alan Watts has it, the fact of being this of being thus, of being so.  Photography says: “tathata!” “There it is. It is thus!”

Photography points to emptiness (sunyata). From the Buddhist point of view, emptiness is the basis of all forms in the universe because everything arises from emptiness. Emptiness is the true nature and the proximate cause of all forms in the universe. At the same time, there is an equivalence between emptiness and form. In the Heart Sutra it is written:

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

Emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness.

Whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form.

Is it possible for a particular to exist without a Form that manifests it?  Stated another way, if a photograph comes into existence without a Form to manifest it, then a  photograph is a thing that exists without a cause. The photograph disproves Plato’s theory of the Form because everything must come from a Form.

Barthes observes that the photograph is the “absolute Particular” in an apparent reference to Plato’s theory. This subverts the theory because there can be no “absolute Particular”; there can only be absolute Forms. All particulars are dependent upon Forms. The photograph is a container for the infinite number of images of all of the particulars in the universe. The photograph manifests nothing. It is empty.  Barthes’ quest was futile; he was searching for a Form of photography that does not exist.

At the end of Part One of Camera Lucida, Barthes concedes that he had not found the eidos or Form of photography. He writes:

I had perhaps learned how my desire worked, but I had not discovered the nature (the eidos) of Photography. I had to grant that my pleasure was an imperfect mediator, and that a subjectivity reduced to its hedonist project could not recognize the universal.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Camera Lucida is a conflicted and enigmatic work. It opens as a philosophical inquiry into the question of photography’s eidos, its Form.  At the end of Part One, Barthes concedes that he has failed because he only found the way that his desires worked and that his subjective reaction to a particular photograph cannot be the basis for finding the Form of photography.  He writes that “a subjectivity reduced to a hedonistic project could not recognize the universal.”  He realizes he must look deep within himself to find the answers he is seeking. He therefore recants Part One, the ode, and writes Part Two as its palinode.  Part Two begins with Barthes searching for his mother by sorting through his photographs. Camera Lucida becomes a way for Barthes to mourn the death of his mother, to seek unity with her and to either find a way out of his suffering or to resign himself to death.

I have spent many years in Amsterdam.  I love the Amsterdam and one of the ways that I enjoy the city is through long term photography projects.  It is a very difficult city to photograph because of the ubiquity of its images: the bridges, the canals, the boats, the brown canal houses with their gables, the trams, the cafes, the bikes, the pretty girls. It has been extensively photographed by masses of tourists. The 17th Century architecture from its Golden Age is beautiful but the sameness of the scale and brickwork does not easily yield creative images. I have a large archive of these types of photographs but they rarely escape the banality of a post card image.  Even the photographs of the masters yield similar images. How is it possible to create a new photograph of Amsterdam? I have struggled with this problem; it is a battle against the cliché; I struggle to scrape away all of my accumulated layers of similarity and habit so that I can create something new.

One day quite some time ago, I was walking in Amsterdam and happened to look down into one of the canals. I saw an old boat, abandoned, half-submerged, trash in the cockpit, weeds growing in the hull, her name faded by the sun and the sea. It made me melancholy to think that she was once a beautiful boat that carried her passengers to the other shore but now, with the passage of time, she will never sail again; she is abandoned and dead. I had never seen a photograph of a dead boat in Amsterdam so I felt as if I had hit upon a new image, one that avoided the cliche. I began to search for more dead boats in the canals and found them everywhere. I photographed these boats every time I was in Amsterdam. I have done this for many years and I have accumulated a large archive of images.

Over the years, I began to revisit places where I remembered that I had taken photographs of specific boats. I began to notice that some of these boats decayed more over time, new weeds and junk filled the cockpits, some had sunk, some had disappeared entirely and new ones had taken their place.  I could compare photographs taken of the same boats over time and see the changes that time’s decay had wrought.  The boats became a metaphor for death, time and memory and these images became the dead boat project.

And then questions arose. Why am I so consumed with taking photographs in the first place? What do these photographs mean, what do they represent? There is a transposition, a transformation, a transference from the boat in the canal to the boat in the photograph but what does it mean?  Does the photograph speak the truth or a lie? How does photography relate to death, time and memory? And then the question that challenges all photographers arose: what should I do with my archive of images of dead boats that I took over ten years?  Should they remain unseen, a database of zeros and ones on my hard drive or should I show them? If I decide to show them, is there a new way other than falling into another cliche like a photo book or a website?

A spoonful of sugar swirls and dissolves in a glass of sunlit emerald tea at the cafe in the Foam Photography Museum in Amsterdam.  On the bar red tulips sit in glass vases with pebbles in the water. A black chocolate cake sits underneath glass. Duchamp’s shoe rack stands in the corner. Rain falls on the canals. Reflections splash on black water. Boats rock, take on water, submerge. Pencil, paper, words. The Westertoren carillon sounds the quarter hour in the glowlight. The wind blowing through the grass, the waterdripsounds of boats in the water, the leaf falling in the canal, the butterfly fluttering to the branch, a seagull watching in silence, a frog plop, a flower, a smile. And at that moment I decided to to find the answers to my questions. Tathata!

I began to research photography philosophy and discovered Camera Lucida. I held the seminal text in my hand; surely it would contain the answers to my questions. I discovered that Barthes’ writing is complex, dense, ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory. It is also profoundly beautiful. Barthes was a shape shifter and this manifests in his writings.  Camera Lucida incorporates many ideas from Barthes prior works as well as oblique references to a broad range of poets, philosophers and academics from many disciplines. It is also a very personal, emotional and curious work; it is concerned with the the passage of time, the death of the mother, and with memory and suffering.  I discovered a large corpus of work that seeks to interpret, illuminate and explicate Camera Lucida. This effort by the academic community continues to this day.

My study of Camera Lucida led me to many of Barthes’ earlier works. I read A Lover’s Discourse, Empire of the Signs, Mythologies, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary and The Neutral.  Along the way I encountered Aristotle, Plato, Buddha, Bergson, Blanchot, Deleuze, Sartre,  Joyce, Heidegger, Rilke, Marker, Godard and Krishnamurti. I studied the works of photographers such as Nobuyoshi Araki, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gregory Crewdson, the Starnes Twins, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Minor White.

The dead boat project became a meta-metaphor for my exploration of death, time and memory and approaching philosophy through the lens of Camera Lucida. Could I bring something new to our understanding of Camera Lucida? I am not an academic but a lawyer and a photographer; perhaps my background could cast new light on the problem.

Like Barthes, I sit at my desk and study my photographs late into the night. My archive has  photographs of dead boats in Amsterdam, of silent streets and moonlit beaches in San Diego, of the rocks and waves of Point Lobos, and of temples high in the mountains of Nepal.  I have studied the philosophers, read the poets and researched the images of many great photographers. These writings are a record of my discoveries on my journey into death, time and memory and Camera Lucida; they are both a homage and a criticism of Camera Lucida. It is beautiful, and brilliant and stunningly original work but Barthes fails to realize his stated purpose in writing the book.  I hope to make some small contribution to photography philosophy along the way.

Barthes was not a photographer even though he wrote extensively on photography. Barthes was not a Buddhist even thought he wrote extensively on Buddhism. Like Barthes my mother is dead but, unlike Barthes, I have let her go; I am not searching  for the essence of my dead mother or to resurrect her through a photograph. As a photographer and a Buddhist my concerns are different.  I want to break through photographic cliches and discover a new paradigm for photography, one inspired by philosophy and technology.  I am searching for my authentic, creative voice. I am searching for the cause of my desire to take photographs in the first place; what compels me to make photographs? What am I  grasping to possess or preserve by making photographs of the thing? Can photography be a spiritual practice for the realization of Buddha mind?

Photography is bound to time. We capture a photograph in the present and, in the very instant that we view the photograph, it shows us a past that is ever receding with the passage of time. By showing us the past, the photograph stimulates our memories. Since photography is bound to time, it is bound to death. In time, everything grows old, decays and dies. Kali, the Hindu goddess of time and death, always prevails in the end.  The photograph always references death, time and memory, as are lives are bound to death, time and memory.

My working thesis is that the Forms of photography are death, time and memory. These Forms manifest all of the photographs in the world. There is no photograph that is not manifested by these Forms. There multiplicity of all of the objects of the world are manifested by these singular Forms.

This is my ode.

A. THE FIRST FORM OF PHOTOGRAPHY: DEATH

This is what death is, most of all: everything that has been seen, will have been seen for nothing. Mourning over what we have perceived. In those brief moments when I speak for nothing, it is as if I were dying. For the loved being becomes a leaden figure, a dream creature who does not speak, and silence, in dreams, is death. Or again: the gratifying Mother shows me the Mirror, the Image, and says to me: “That’s you.” But the silent Mother does not tell me what I am: I am no longer established, I drift painfully, without existence.

Roland Barthes, A Lovers Discourse

Ultimately, what I am seeking in the photograph taken of me (the “intention” according to which I look at it) is Death as the eidos of that Photograph.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Death of the Mother

Overcrowded gathering. Inevitable, increasing futility. I think of her, in the next room. Everything collapses. It is, here, the formal beginning of the big, long bereavement. For the first time in two days, the acceptable notion of my own death.

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

Barthes was devastated by the death of his mother. The day after her death, October 25, 1977, he began a “mourning diary.” He wrote notes on slips of paper (regular typing-paper cut into quarters) of which he kept a large supply on his desk. Barthes compiled these notes which  became Mourning Diary;  he integrated some of them  into Camera Lucida. Mourning Diary is painful to read. For example:

Now, from time to time, there unexpectedly rises within me, like a bursting bubble: the realization that she no longer exists, she no longer exists, totally and forever. This is a flat condition, utterly unadjectival- dizzying because meaningless (without any possible interpretation). A new pain.

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

In Mourning Diary, Barthes writes of walking the streets of Paris and sitting in its cafes. Lonely and mourning, he sees death everywhere. He sees people enjoying the cafe life but he knows they will die; they are not facing their death, their inevitable fate, in these ordinary moments of life.

Now, everywhere, in the street, the café, I see each individual under the aspect of ineluctably having-to-die, which is exactly what it means to be mortal.— And no less obviously, I see them as not knowing this to be so.

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

Although Part One of Camera Lucida begins as an “ontological” quest to find the Form of photography, its focus changes in Part Two. In the face of the inescapable reality of the death of his mother, Barthes pivots and Camera Lucida becomes a meditation on death and mourning.  In his desperation Barthes struggles to find his mother’s essence and to resurrect her from death through the photographic image. Or perhaps, he sought to transform the photograph from an image representing death to one representing life.

Maman’s photo as a little girl, in the distance-in front of me on my desk. It was enough for me to look at it, to apprehend the suchness of her being (which I struggle to describe) in order to be reinvested by, immersed in, invaded, inundated by her goodness.

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

Barthes was seeking the “suchness” of his mother’s “being,” the “essence of her identity,” “her features” and  the “truth of the face he had loved” in the image. He uses the word “suchness” in Camera Lucida which is a fundamental Buddhist concept. . Suchness or “tathata” points to the true nature of reality beyond description and conceptualization. “Suchness” is deliberately undefinable to keep us from conceptualizing it.  Tathata is the root of “tathagata” which is an alternate term for Buddha. Tathagata means either “one who has thus come” or “one who has thus gone.” It is sometimes translated “one who is such.”

Barthes sits alone in his apartment slowly sorting photographs of his mother under his desk lamp. He finds the Winter Garden Photograph. It is an old, faded, brown photograph of his mother in a glassed-in conservatory which she called the  winter garden. It is an image of his mother who was five and her brother who was seven. He discovers his mother’s essence: gentleness and kindness. This is more than a description of her identity: it is her truth, her essence or, perhaps, her aura.  The photograph achieves the “impossible science of the unique being”.  Barthes’ mother becomes the Form of the universal and radiant Mother  whose qualities are expressed in all mothers. Barthes extends this notion to assert that the Winter Garden Photograph becomes the Form of all  photography. He writes:

Something like an essence of the Photograph floated in this particular picture. I therefore decided to “derive” all Photography (its “nature”) from the only photograph which assuredly existed for me, and to take it somehow as a guide for my last investigation.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

The universal Mother becomes the Form which  gives birth to photography.

Barthes does not show us the Winter Garden Photograph because Form is not visible; it is ethereal, and immaterial, it is the perfection of the ideal, un-expressible as an image fixed to paper.  Barthes wrote that the essence of the photograph “floated” in the Winter Garden Photograph. I have the sense that Barthes is referring to his mother’s aura that is emanating from the body or corpus of the photograph.

Even though the Winter Garden Photograph represents the mother, the source of all life and of his life, Barthes cannot escape from the fact that the Winter Garden Photograph  embodied the death of his mother. When he sees her as a child in the garden, he knows that she will die, and he must face the fact of her death. He feels as if she has died twice.

This leads Barthes to equate photography with death. He adopts  the common view, the blind opinion, according to Socrates, the doxa: the Form of photography is death. Barthes ignores the possibility that the Form of the Winter Garden Photograph is life; all he sees is death: his mother’s death, his suffering and ultimately his own death.

Barthes saw no reason to remain living; he resigned from life. The only thing remaining for him to do was to wait for  his time to die,  in silence, with nothing left to say. His mother dies twice and he too must die, in time. Time and death. He writes in the Mourning Diary:

Today, around 5:00 in the afternoon, everything is just about settled: a definitive solitude, having no other conclusion but my own death.

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

We see the same thought in Camera Lucida:

From now on I could do no more than await my total, un-dialectical death.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Barthes died within a year of his mother.

Photographers Are Agents of Death

All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Qui facit per alium, facit per se means he who acts through another is deemed in law to do it himself.  If death is the principal, then the photographer is the agent. Death acts through the agency of the photographer.

The taking of a photograph is the taking of life. The camera’s shutter separates the world of the living from the world of the dead. Open: life. Closed: death. The dynamic energy of a living person is reduced to a a static, bloodless print, a flat death; a reduction from four dimensions to two dimensions. We become a witness to this transformation whenever we view the photograph. The photograph reminds us of the loss or death of our beloved and of our death.

Life exists in four dimensions: height, width, depth and time. Life is energy expressed in time. The camera translates four dimensional life into two dimensional death: height and width. The corpus becomes paper. In the instant of the click of the shutter, the camera stops the movement of life, energy is frozen to degree zero, the volume of the corpus is flattened to the line. The image embodied within the print  becomes something outside the flow of time. The print disintegrates in time as all things disintegrate in time.

Two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolutely superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past (“this-has-been”), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

We try to preserve life by taking photographs but we only produce  images of death’s face. We try to preserve our happiness  but we only remind ourselves of our loss. We try to preserve our memories  but they become vague, wisps of our experiences, lost in time.

The photograph embodies a temporal dislocation. We believe the person is alive because we took their photograph but, as time flows from the present  to the past, the subject will inevitably die. The image never recreates the embrace.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability and mutability. By slicing out a moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

Susan Sontag, On Photography

Every photograph is a catastrophe because, whether or not the subject is already dead, it is evidence that it will die in the future.  It is like temporal vertigo. Barthes calls photography a “flat death”.  Perhaps it was his emotional flatness after the death of his mother that suggested the flatness of the two-dimensional photograph. The print has two sides: one side is the death of the mother, the other side is the death of the son.

The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Over time, the memories embedded in the photograph fade as the observer’s memories weaken, dim, distort. The print ages and becomes yellow, spotted, brittle, and faded.  Its power to stimulate memory and emotion weakens. The subject and the observer both become subject to the Buddhist law of old age, sickness and death. The photograph becomes another image, meaningless, unseen, decayed to dust.

I consider Araki’s masterwork “Ojo ShashuPhotography for the Afterlife: Alluring Hell”.  Images of sunsets, unmade beds, a dead cat, a dead wife, caskets, flowers, the photographer’s shadow, garish red, green and yellow skies, clouds of atomic hallucinations, negative prints, out-of-focus images, overexposed and underexposed images. A sullen, sulfuric sun sets in the distance, telephone wires, fading light, clouds, darkness. Image after image of loss, sadness, loneliness and death. Death is hidden in the camera.

The photographer is dead.

I consider Masahisa Fukase’s great work “Ravens”. Clouds of ravens fly across the night clouds. They gather on the telephone poles, in the trees, on the jetties. Black silhouettes of death. They float on the seas. Their eyes are diamond sparks in the night. Dead ravens buried partially on a desolate sandy beach, sea wrack and drift trash. Blurred black  forms,  raven wing fans on dirty snow. The tragedies of Fukase horrify and inspire me.

I inherited a lifetime of my father’s photographs. As a child I remember the special occasions when I was invited into his darkroom: the magic of the ghostly images slowly surfacing on the photo paper floating in the trays, the smell of the chemicals, the dripping of the prints as they dried, the large and mysterious enlarger, the glow of the red light. I throw boxes and boxes of his photographs of love, life and family into the dumpster in the alley behind the house. They are blown about by the hot desert winds and then caught by  dust devils, prints and negatives swirling in the bright blue sky, the blinding white sun, brown dust shrouds, impaled on the cactus.  Death, time and memory are blown  high by the hot desert winds. Dirt, rocks, tumbleweeds, wind, heat and paper. The father is dead, the photographer is dead, the photographs are abandoned, scattered across the desert. The Rolleiflex is sold. Ravens fly over the grave.

I am a photographer.

I am the agent of my own death.

Memento Mori

Memento Mori=I remember-I remember to die=remember that you have lived (not: that you have finished living, but: that it is absolutely real that you did live).

Roland Barthes, The Neutral

Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made up face beneath which we see the dead.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

“Memento mori” is a Latin phrase that means “remember you must die.”  Cadavers, tombs, chapels of bones (Capela dos Ossos: “We bones, lying here bare, await yours.”).   The  Danse Macabre, timepieces (time flees, the last hour). The skeletons, skulls and piles of bones carved in the old wood transoms over the doorways on Amsterdam’s Zeedijk. To remember that we must die is to bring death into the forefront of our consciousness and to change our daily behavior.  Memento mori.

Life is short, and shortly it will end;

Death comes quickly and respects no one,

Death destroys everything and takes pity on no one.

To death we are hastening, let us refrain from sinning.

If you do not turn back and become like a child,

And change your life for the better,

You will not be able to enter, blessed, the Kingdom of God.

To death we are hastening, let us refrain from sinning.

Llibre Vermell de Montserrat (1399)

Death is the universal, inescapable fact of the human condition: all must die, the rich and the poor, the brilliant and the dim, the saint and the sinner.  We do not know the time or circumstances of our death. Does it wait for us today? We must face death alone. We live in avoidance, denial and fear. Still we must accept and contemplate our death. We must derive meaning from death even though it is an utterly unknowable state, if it is a state at all.

To consider that we will lose everything when we die is to inspire ourselves to lead a meaningful life.  Each day is a gift, even those days that are tedious or painful. We must remind ourselves not to waste time on that which is trivial or vain. Life becomes a preparation for death. This is memento mori.

Tantric monks meditate on top of corpuses in dark graveyards. As Buddha said: “Of all the footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditation, that on death is supreme.”

In his Moral Letters to Lucilius Seneca urged:

Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day…The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.

For Barthes all photographs are memento mori.  Photographs record death. They reflect our past and remind us that we have lost that which is precious to us: our loved ones, our youth, our health, our possessions, our happiness. They remind us of the  losses that are a consequence of the passage of time.

When Barthes found the Winter Garden Photograph he had a “lacerating” realization that his mother would die: he saw his mother when she was a child and knew  she would die in the future. He was reminded that he would die one day. The Winter Garden Photograph became a memento mori.

Photographs of old boats: hulls sinking into the stagnant water, weathered, scored and broken wood, reflections of trees and clouds in the inky water, leaves decaying in the water, trash floating in the water trapped in the boat well, disintegrating, slowly floating down into the muck of the canal.

Memento mori.

Photography is a manifestation of the Form that is death.

Vanitas

Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Life is short and fragile and we must use it to prepare for life after death.

Ecclesiastes

The vanitas school of painting arose in the Netherlands in the 17th century. Vanitas paintings are still life compositions of skulls, candles, bubbles, rotten fruit, wilting flowers, clocks, hourglasses, musical instruments, wine and books. They show us that life is impermanent, that worldly pleasures and objects are fragile and empty pursuits, and that we will lose everything in time. Life is short and death is long; we must use our life to prepare for our death. Vanitas are paradoxical because they often celebrate life but are animated by a powerful reminder of the inevitability of death. They oscillate between life and death, animation and stasis.

Philippe de Champaigne’s Still Life With a Skull (1691) is a classic example of vanitas art.  It has three elements: a tulip in a bowl of water, a skull and an hourglass. The tulip is fresh but the water will evaporate and the tulip will wilt and die. The skull is already dead. The skull contained a mind filled with memories that were lost upon death. The sand is flowing through the hourglass, the body has died and the flesh has fallen from the skull. The sand flows through the hourglass in the present, someone had just turned the hourglass over. Present, past and future death. Flower, skull and hourglass: death, time and memory.

Where is the life in a photograph? Life is everything that the photograph is not: movement, energy, dimensionality, heart. There is no potential in a photograph; it is a dead cold thing, like a bleached, anthropological bone.

Photographers create vanitas in print.

The Form of photography is death.

Remember, thou art mortal!

Banal Meditations  On Death

In The Neutral Barthes observed that we never think anything but banal thoughts when contemplating death. We process our thoughts on death through the “stereotypes of mankind”.  These are inevitably anxiety and fear. Barthes quotes Michelangelo who described his experience on old age, sickness, and death in one of his last sonnets:

Only my coughs and colds prevent my body from dying; if my soul cannot get out the lower exit, my breath itself can get out through my mouth. I am by now worn out, ruptured, crushed and broken by my labors, and death is my tavern, where I eat and stay at a price. I find my happiness in melancholy, and my rest in these discomforts: so may whoever seeks misfortune be granted it by God…My scribblings about love, the muses, flowery grottoes have ended up on tambourines or as waste-paper in inns, latrines and brothels. What was the good of having set myself to make so many rag-dolls, if they have led me to such an end, like someone who crossed the sea only to drown in snot? The esteemed art, through which at one time I was held in such high regard, has brought me to this: I am poor, old, and a slave in others’ power, so that I shall be a human wreck, if death does not come soon.

Like Barthes, I am  imprisoned by my inability to write anything original about death; my words are obvious and hackneyed; I am embarrassed by my attempt. Death is a literary, philosophical and religious singularity. Death defeats all of our strategies to either avoid or confront the awful fact of death. We cannot negotiate with the silent, faceless void. Even though I believe in the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth, doubt gnaws away at my faith in the circumstances of my next life. Even if have lived a meritorious life, my karmic debts may cause me to be reborn in a hell realm; I awaken in the night consumed with fear. There is no escape from death, it is a monolithic black wall that we cannot walk through, around or over.

I cannot face death, yet I cannot avoid it. I cannot understand death, yet I must know it.  I cannot accept death yet its heavy hand rests on my shoulder.  I respond with silence.

I avoid thinking about death. I avoid the vanitas paintings in museums; I look away from memento mori, the skeletons and skulls and clocks, over the doorways in Amsterdam.  I repress, evade and deny. I do not want to remember that I must die.  How can I think about something so unfathomable and frightening as death? It  must be like falling into a black hole; nothing escapes its gravitational field, not even light. Since my  death is certain to occur but the time and proximate cause are uncertain,  I fill my life with busyness and accomplishment. This leaves me with no time to contemplate death (deliverables must be met, productivity must increase, money must be made) nor to use it to make my life more meaningful. I will not do so unless circumstances force me. Zen teaches: Great is the matter of life and death. Awaken, do not waste this life!

My photographs are records of temporal dislocation. The instant they are taken they document the past. As time flows forward, they recede relentlessly from that instant, to the past and then to the distant past. This dislocation increases perpetually but not linearly. As the distance between the “present” and the time the photograph was taken increases, the perception of the distance to that time increases exponentially due to the degradation and distortion that time brings to memory; it is like looking through the wrong end of the telescope.  My photographs measure my remaining life but the unit of measure is not fixed.

I see the tip of the arrow of time pointing at my heart; the bowstring is taught. Who pulls back the string, holds it tight, tense, waiting and breathless? When will the arrow be released? Has it already been released, is it in flight, even now? The distance to my heart is unknown but, when it pierces my chest, I will die.

This fills me with dread and melancholy. Even though I do not know the flight of the arrow, I seek to evade it by seeking adventures climbing mountains and sailing, as if by risking my life I can conquer death. Perhaps if I can know death I can avoid death. This is a dangerous game indeed.

There are four obvious facts about death. Death  is certain. Everyone will die. There is no escape. All physical forms in the universe will collapse back into the void  from which they came. Death is a certainty that will arrive at an uncertain time. We do not know when it will come but it will come for us when we least expect it. The bowstring is taught; the arrow is aimed at our hearts; the archer’s arm shakes with tension. Perhaps it will come, tonight, when I am walking on Moonlight Beach listening to the sounds of the sea, seeing the golden pathway to the moon, feeling the soft, wet, sinking sand? Marcel Proust describes these in The Guermantes Way:

We say that the hour of death is uncertain, but we think of that hour as in a vague and remote expanse of time. It doesn’t occur to us that it can mean that death – or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold – may occur this very afternoon. One insists on one’s daily outing; one hesitated over which coat to take; the whole day lies before one; one hopes that it will be fine again tomorrow; and one has no suspicion that death, which has been advancing within one, on another plane, has chosen precisely this particular day to make its appearance. And perhaps those who are habitually haunted by the fear of the utter strangeness of death will find something reassuring in this kind of first contact with it, because death thus assumes a known, familiar, everyday guise. A good lunch preceded it.

Death is outside of knowledge; there is no way to acquire any knowledge about death. It is a void from which no life, light, time or information can escape. Death is the other side of life’s event horizon. We we are born we emerge from the darkness and when we die we will return to the darkness. Death is the end of potentiality.

Death is personal to me; my death is my own. No one can experience it with me; no one can experience it for me. I must face Goddess Kali alone. She terrifies me: dark blue skin, wild hair, red fangs, a belt of severed arms, a sword and a bodiless heads. She is the goddess of time and the mother and destroyer of the universe. In vast cycles of time spanning billions of years, she creates, preserves and destroys the universe. Within death there is life.

Joyce writes of the facts of death in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The rector of the boy’s school where Stephan lives gives the young boys a horrifying description of the eternal torments of hell that will experience if they lead a sinful life. He preaches:

And this day will come, shall come, must come; the day of death and the day of judgment. It is appointed unto man to die and after death the judgment. Death is certain. The time and manner are uncertain, whether from long disease or from some unexpected accident; the Son of God cometh at an hour when you little expect Him. Be therefore ready every moment, seeing that you may die at any moment. Death is the end of us all.

My emotional response to those who are dead is flat: indifference, resignation and a vague feeling of contempt. I do not care about the dead. I do not remember the dead. I do not think of the dead. I do not visit the dead in cemeteries nor do I keep photographs of the dead. I do not believe in the temporal body; I believe in the eternal Spirit. I release my attachment to the dead and let them go.

The truth of the human condition is the inescapable reality of old age, sickness and death. We are impermanent but we long for permanence. This creates suffering but we are unable to use our awareness of impermanence to reduce our suffering and to live a more positive and peaceful life. Without this realization, we tend to live in anxiety, dread and fear.

Barthes wrote Camera Lucida in response to an existential crisis that was triggered by his mother’s death. It is both a novella of death and mourning and a collection of fragments that reference and criticize much of his prior thinking. Death permeates Camera Lucida like the incense on the altar. In Mourning Diary Barthes writes:

The truth about mourning is quite simple: now that maman is dead, I am faced with death (nothing any longer separates me from it except time).

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

Barthes uses both writing and the image as a way to reconcile his feelings of loss and despair. Like Paul Valery, he wants “to write a little compilation about her, just for myself” and but he also searches  through his old photographs in an attempt to “recognize” the essence of  his mother. This is an attempt to bring her, or perhaps her soul, back to life. His desire to write a book about his mother  is anticipated in Mourning Diary:

Only I know what my road has been for the last year and a half: the economy of this motionless and anything but spectacular mourning that has kept me unceasingly separate by its demands; a separation that I have ultimately always projected to bring to a close by a book—Stubbornness, secrecy.

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

In Camera Lucida we see Barthes using a curious strategy of writing about photography as a way to resurrect his mother and to reconcile himself to his loss. Consequently, the book contains many associations between the death of the mother and photography. The Form of photography becomes death.

Barthes writes, for example:

Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death. Life / Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

The camera has the magical (and perhaps destructive) power to transform a living, dynamic person existing within the flow of time into a static image that is outside of time, and thus dead. This transformation happens in time, at the instant of the click of the shutter, and the power that provides the energy for this metamorphosis is light. The photographer becomes the agent of death who is associated with darkness but, paradoxically, it is through the image created with light that Barthes seeks to resurrect his  mother. Light and dark; life and death.

Like Barthes I cannot escape my confrontation with death. I must consider how Barthes uses the image and the written word to reconcile his mother’s death and his suffering. Further, I must explore how his response to his mother’s death impacts his life.

Considering Barthes, Death and the Form of Photography-Introduction

Camera Lucida is a book of death, sorrow and suffering. The punctum (the other element of Barthes’ famous punctum/studium duality) represents the existential wound inflicted on Barthes’ soul by the death of his mother. Barthes anticipates his own death shortly after Camera Lucida was published; all he can do is wait for his own “undialectical death”.  He wrote that “each photograph always contains this impervious sign of my future death”.  (Camera Lucida at 97).  The click of the camera shutter separates the living from the dead. The photograph is the “dead theater of Death” and photographers therefore become its macabre playwrights. In the quote on the back cover of Camera Lucida, Marpa speaks of his son’s death. It is no wonder that Death becomes the eidos, the Form of the photograph.

It is well documented that Jacques Derrida, Barthes’s friend, was obsessed with death and mourning. “I mourn therefore I am” he wrote. Derrida’s texts on mourning were collected and published in English in a book entitled The Work of Mourning and it includes his writings to commemorate the deaths of his friends including Barthes, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.  Derrida wrote that death permeated Barthes’ life and work:

While still living, he wrote a death of Roland Barthes by himself. And, finally, his deaths, his texts on death, everything he wrote, with such insistence on displacement, on death, on the theme of Death, if you will, if indeed there is such a theme. From the Novel to the Photograph, from Writing Degree Zero (1953) to Camera Lucida (1980) a certain thought of death set everything in motion…

The key inquiry Derrida asks in almost all of these texts is what should he do after the death of a friend: to speak or to remain silent. He finds that he has a duty to speak on behalf of the deceased even though it may be an insult. It is a matter of fidelity to the deceased. It is an impossible choice and so Derrida steers a middle course: he would let the voice of the deceased serve as a counterpoint to his own voice.

Derrida writes of the multiple lives of Roland Barthes that led to his multiple deaths:

The deaths of Roland Barthes: his deaths, that is, of those close to him, those deaths that must have inhabited him, situating places and solemn moments, orienting tombs in his inner space (ending – and probably even beginning – with his mother’s death). His deaths, those he lived in the plural, those he must have linked together, trying in vain to “dialectize” them before the “total” and “undialectical” death; those deaths that always form in our lives a terrifying and endless series. But how did he “live” them?

Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning

How did Barthes live his multiple lives? What was his response to his multiple deaths? Was it repression, avoidance and defeat or was it skillful action and transformation? What was the quality of his life after the death of his mother?

This inquiry is critical to the field of Barthian studies because he brought the human condition-his subjective experience, directly into his work. In such works as a Lover’s Discourse, Mourning Diary and Camera Lucida, we see a human being facing love and death and yet, as a philosopher, he created architectures of dense logic and analysis in such fields as structuralism, semiotics, literary criticism, and cultural theory. Annette Lavers in her work “Roland Barthes:Structuralism and After” observes that Barthes’ career falls into four phases: a statement of general attitudes, structuralism, a movement from “semiology to semanalysis” and the human phase. She writes:

Suddenly, something seemed to have happened to Barthes, a mellowing which they could trace in subjects and attitudes…Barthes from his third phase on, seemed to speak no longer as a message-sender but as a message-receiver and the reader he had in mind was himself.

This oscillation, this interweaving, between the personal and the theory, the emotion and the logic, the life and the thought made Barthes free to modify, reverse and even abandon his interests and theories as his life evolved. This also led to his brilliance as a writer; his elegance and subtlety with the written word was legendary. This is what makes Barthes such a complex and interesting figure.

The inescapable fact of the human condition is suffering. We live in time and time destroys everything we love.  The result is suffering. What is our response to be? Should we deny, avoid and repress the fact of suffering and descend into deeper suffering, despair, or dull the pain with destructive behavior or consider suicide? Or should we use it as a force of transformation? What was Barthes’ response to his suffering? I turn to the philosopher, the enlightened one and the poet to shed light on these questions and to help us avoid the banal.

Martin Heidegger. How can we use anxiety about our death as a stimulus to transform ourselves into a more authentic way of life?

Gautama Buddha. The truth of the human condition is suffering. Knowing this, how do we live without descending into defeat and despair? What is the path to escape suffering?

Maria Rainer Rilke. How do we work with the great sadness of our lives to gain wisdom, change and live with our suffering?

Heidegger is the way of analysis and the intellect,  Buddha is the way of practice and awakening, and Rilke is the way of poetry and the heart. They use the reality of death as the pathway wisdom and transformation.

Heidegger and Death

Once she was dead I no longer had any reason to attune myself to the progress of the superior life Force (the race, the species). My particularity could never again universalize itself (unless, utopically, by writing, whose project hence-forth would become the ·unique goal of my life). From now on I could do no more than await my total, undialectical death.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

The one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death.

Socrates

Martin Heidegger in his magnum opus Being and Time deeply investigated the most fundamental and profound questions of the human experience. What does it mean for something to exist or to be? Does this tree, boat or cat exist? Do we, as human beings exist? What is existence and what is our experience of being in the world?

Life is defined by the duality of death and life. We cannot understand being without understanding non-being. Death is the boundary of being; it limits life. We see death everywhere but we avoid thinking about death because we lack the courage to face it directly.

Heidegger was concerned with a specific type of being: the experience of the human being which he called “Dasein”. Dasien is being in the world. It is an authentic engagement with being with an attitude of caring about the quality of one’s everyday life. Human beings are different from other things (such as a tree or a cat) because only they must face the question of the meaning of being in the world. In Heidegger’s words:

Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task.

Being and Time 3: 31

Dasein exists in either an authentic or inauthentic way. To exist authentically does not mean to exist in a static state but rather, to be a dynamic being who constantly questions, searches, and becomes. We challenge, we struggle, we evolve. We face both life and death and in doing so expand the quality of our being. To live an authentic life is to prepare for death

To exist inauthentically is to lead a life that follows the mainstream crowd and its conventional thinking; to simply drift along. Although Being and Time is a complicated work, its basic idea is simple: Being is time. That is to say,“to be” means to exist for a finite period of time between birth and death. Our existence, our being, is lived in time, our time is finite and it ends with our death. Therefore, if we want to understand what it means to be an authentic human being, we must constantly project our lives out onto the horizon of our death. Heidegger called this  “being-towards-death”. The self can become what it truly is only through its confrontation with death; it must make meaning out of its ending.

Death has four qualities. First, death is non-relational. We are the only one who can experience our death; no one else can experience it for us and we cannot experience it for anyone else. We must face death alone. Second, the fact of our death is a certainty.  It does not matter how much we avoid or repress the idea of our death, it is a certainty. Third, the time of our death is uncertain even though the fact of our death is certain. Fourth, death ends all of our human potential. After our death, we have no more potential for action.

What does it mean to be an authentic human being?

We are free to choose between living either an authentic or inauthentic way of life but choose we must. Do we want to be an authentic person, to be the author of our lives and embrace our full potential? Or do we want to mindlessly follow the mainstream, floating along with the crowd, failing to actively participate in life by choosing how we live? Do we want the herd to choose our  lives? Heidegger calls this the state of “falling”.

The problem with existing in the state of falling is that we do not own up to who we really are; we let the crowd make our choices for us. We are afraid to be an individual and to resist the mainstream. We are caught up in fads, styles, and normative behaviors. We have surrendered our unique self to ordinary ways of living, thinking, and communicating. We are skating across the surface of life; we avoid the uncertainty and risk inherent in change. We are inauthentic.

According to Heidegger, to become authentic we must transform our lives, we must reject our everyday life and embrace a new life, one with different assumptions, motivations and goals. How do we make this transformation?

We must care about who we are and what we are. We must be aware of the relationship between what we are in the present and what we can be in the future. We must be dedicated to leading a life that unfolds into a realm of possibilities. We must accept the uncertainties that life brings and welcome them with open arms. We must take a stand on our authentic being. We must do the work. We must accept the risk and the fear of change. We must be the authors of our lives.

When we work towards authenticity, we achieve clear vision. For Heidegger, this means being resolute: we follow our conscience and act in alignment with our authentic self. We embark upon a vision quest to acquire self-knowledge, become  more authentic and expand our potential for acting in the world.

This is a difficult path to walk and we may not begin the journey unless we have strong motivation to change. What are the catalysts that shift us from an inauthentic to an authentic life?

The First Transformative Shift- Anxiety

The first major shift occurs when we experience anxiety. The familiar world that seems to assure our security breaks down. The earth crumbles beneath our feet, and we imagine we must then fall into an abyss and grasp at air. Because we are alone in our dying, we imagine that we are alone in the world. We realize that everything is impermanent, and we fear the unknown that is death.  One of the most powerful  sources of our anxiety is the fear of death.

Anxiety is not fear.  Fear is a feeling of danger or a threat caused by a specific thing in the world, such as an intruder in the night. Anxiety is a low grade nervousness, a general sense of impending danger, an oppression, worries without causes.  Heidegger said that anxiety is  “nothing and nowhere”.  It is a generalized sense of dread; a crisis of meaning.

Anxiety may be a catalyst that stimulates us to embark upon the journey of transformation. Rather than being consumed with anxiety, if we acknowledge our “aloneness” in the world, then we may hear the quiet voices that speak wisdom to our hearts and open us to transformation. There is an alchemical quality to anxiety if we are willing to work with it. It produces spiritual heat that may purify us and open our eyes to wisdom. From wisdom comes acceptance of impermanence, suffering and death. If we are open to this wisdom, our anxiety dissolves, we embrace new possibilities and become more authentic human beings.

The Second Transformative Shift-the Certainty of Death

The first hour that gave us life took away also an hour.

Seneca

The second transformative shift is our encounter with the fact of death. We live as if death is an abstract idea that may happen only in the distant future; it will never really happen to us. As Proust said:

We do not live with the reality of death guiding our day-to-day decisions because we assume that we will not die on the way to lunch.  The  uncertainty as to the time of our death helps us avoid facing up to death; we can ignore it and pursue our everyday, ordinary lives, as if we will live forever. Michel de Montaigne, the French Renaissance philosopher wrote:

Tis the condition of your creation; death is a part of you, and whilst you endeavor to evade it, you evade yourselves. This very being of yours that you now enjoy is equally divided betwixt life and death. The day of your birth is one day’s advance towards the grave.

If we want to be an authentic human being, we must consciously project our lives out to the event horizon of our death. We must knowingly accept that our life is temporary and our life is  a journey to our death. We must find meaning in death’s embrace; we cannot avoid or deny death. This is why some esoteric Buddhist traditions practice meditating on graves. This is what Heidegger called “being-towards-death.”

Death is a part of our very being and to avoid contemplating death and using its finality to bring meaning into our lives is to avoid ourselves. (Do we have a choice?  Otherwise, we live only to die, and our lives are meaningless.) To study philosophy is to learn how to die.

Third Transformative Shift-The Call of Conscience

The third transformative shift is the call of conscience.  If we listen to our conscience it may tell us that we are falling short of our potential, that we are not doing our best. We may be uninspired, we may be lost, we may be lazy and drifting along in the mainstream of life, we may be defeated. But we must take responsibility for our lives and live with clarity of purpose; we must be fully engaged in realizing our potential. We must overcome our obstacles and acknowledge that they are our pathway to growth. We must act with conviction to do the work needed to transform ourselves and lead an authentic life. The work may be uncertain and uncomfortable but it must be done. We must own up to our actions and stand behind them.

It is only when we acknowledge conscience and the obligations it imposes on us that we can expand our potential as human beings. We must always ask the fundamental question that motivates us to move forward: “What is next”?  And the corollary to this  question is “What is right action”?

Conscience is the movement from inauthenticity to authenticity.

Heidegger said that conscience is a “call” but what exactly is being “called”?  We begin by making a call to ourselves. Our call “is a silent call that silences the chatter of the world and brings me back to myself.” The call silences the herd and its normative behaviors and leads us  to our unique, authentic self. The call brings us back to our true self but we can only hear the call if we are silent: silent from the noise of our egoic selves and from the noise of the crowd. It is only in a state of silence that we can realize Spirit and the peace and wisdom that it brings. It is only in the state of silence that we  can learn to identify with our  true Self, our Spirit, rather than with our egos. This is authenticity; it is the union with who we really are rather than our identification with our egos, which is a false, illusory self.     

Heidegger defined the call of conscience as “being towards death”.  “As soon as man comes to life” writes Heidegger, “he is at once old enough to die.”

Conscience is like the experience of the human being calling itself back to its mortality, somewhat like Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull.

When Hamlet holds up Yorick’s skull, he stares into the face of death itself. The skull is Hamlet’s memento mori. Hamlet remembers Yorick as a jester and a youthful playmate. Hamlet said: “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now”?  He is contemptuous, repelled and intrigued. The contrast between Yorick as “a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy” and his abhorrent skull forces Hamlet to confront death. He understands that everyone will end up in a grave looking like Yorick.  He sees death as a part of life. Hamlet moves towards authenticity because he considers the meaning of death rather than denying death; he literally stares at death. Perhaps Hamlet understands that it is better to be than not to be?

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Death is an undeniable human reality and we must confront death rather than avoid it. When we confront death  we must consider how it may transform our everyday lives. We must be careful to not let it lead us into resignation, morbidity and depression. Rather, we should use death as inspiration to live fully in each moment and to begin our journey to authenticity.

Anticipating Death-Being-Towards-Death

It is only in being-towards-death that one can become the person who one truly is. Concealed in the idea of death as the possibility of impossibility is the acceptance on one’s mortal limitation as the basis for an affirmation of one’s life.

Simon Critchley, Being and Time: Why Heidegger Matter

Since our death is a certainty, we should anticipate death. We should stop clinging to life and begin accepting the reality of death. According to Heidegger, we should integrate acceptance of death into a permanent part of our mindset.

Accepting death liberates us from fear and avoidance. This does not mean that we are resigned to waiting for our death  but rather, it is a dynamic attitude that gives us the basis to act freely in the world. If we simply wait for death to happen as Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida, then we have adopted an inauthentic way of being-towards-death. We lose  our freedom to act  in the world. This is precisely the path that Barthes took when he resigned himself to waiting for his own death after the death of his mother.

Barthes, Death and Heidegger

From Heidegger’s point of view, the fundamental question of the human condition is whether we lead an authentic or an authentic life. To become an authentic human being we must face death, accept death and use its inevitability to inspire us to live with  purpose and meaning. Death is the catalyst for life. After the death of his mother, Barthes’ life collapsed; he saw no further purpose in living; he was paralyzed by grief, he withdrew from the world and became resigned to his own death, perhaps multiple deaths: those of the son, the elderly mother and the anticipation of the little girl who would become the mother as shown in the Winter Garden Photograph.

Death did not provide fuel for the alchemical fire which could have purified and transformed Barthes. He was not  open to leading an authentic life. He was not interested in “What’s next”? He did not head the call to battle, to do the hard spiritual work of finding his unique, authentic self, to break through the paralysis and suffering caused by the death of his mother.  Rather than using death as an affirmation of life,  all Barthes could do was wait for his own death.  Jacques Derrida wrote about Barthes’ condition in his work The Work of Mourning: “there designated a way of life-it was for a short time his, after his mother’s death-a life that already resembled death, one death before the other, more than one, which it imitated in advance.” Two months after the death of his mother he died.

The Winter Garden Photograph to Barthes was like Yorick’s skull to Hamlet. Barthes stares at the photograph, transfixed, paralyzed and motionless. He sees frustration, despair and resignation. His mother’s death transformed into his own death.

Did Barthes consciously consider the question of to be or not to be as did Hamlet?

To be, or not to be, that is the question,

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Although Hamlet initially seems to prefer death to the suffering inherent in life, upon further consideration he realizes that he does not know what will happen to him when he dies. This fills him with dread; no one returns from death so we have no insight into what may await us when we die. He observes that “conscience does make cowards of us all”. And, ironically, this is precisely what Heidegger suggests: it is the call of conscience that makes us face these hard questions without answers and, hopefully, pick an authentic life with all of its slings and arrows over suicide. We may not be cowards; we must be strong and brave; authenticity is not the pathway for the conforming or the weak.

Even though Barthes was consumed with anxiety and suffered deeply over the certainty of his multiple deaths, he did not hear the call of conscience.  He was not motivated by the death of his mother to examine his life and consider how he  could realize his potential as a human being. He did not see that his mother’s death could be a path to transformation. He was not inspired to move toward a more authentic life; one  aligned with Spirit and his unique Self. There was no movement and growth, he was in a state of falling.  There was nothing to do for Barthes but wait to die. It seems that his response to Hamlet’s question was that it is better to “not be” than to “be”. This implies that his perception of the suffering he experienced in his life was greater than the fear and potential suffering he would experience after his death.

To live a life of authenticity means that we must become aware of the possibilities that life can offer and we expand in a way that is in alignment with our innermost essence, our true Self. We are aware of our mortality, we become anxious and we become stimulated to search for an authentic life.

However, inauthenticity should not be rejected as an inferior or undesirable state. These two ways of living are interdependent and complimentary. They are stages in our personal evolution. We must acknowledge that we have fallen into a state of inauthenticity, realize that it limits our freedom and growth,  and use this awareness to become more authentic. If we realize that we have lost our true selves, fallen into busyness and trapped in an empty, ordinary life, then we should use that awareness as a catalyst to become more authentic. This implies a certain level of self-awareness and energy to do the work necessary to transform ourselves into a more authentic mode of being.  We must accept that we own our lives and that we can exercise our agency to make choices that move us closer to an authentic mode of being. We must care. We must act.

Barthes wrote Camera Lucida in response to the death of his mother. It begins as an exploration of the ontology of photography but then evolves into a search for comfort and resolution in the face of the mystery of death and suffering, and an attempt to resurrect and unite with his mother through the image.

However, Barthes did not examine the meaning of his mother’s death. Death did not lead to an examination of his life and movement to a more authentic mode of being; it only led to resignation and defeat even though he was wracked with anxiety and suffering over his multiple deaths.  Barthes accepted a life without transformation, without potential, without authenticity. He should have acted but did not care. The philosopher John Macquarrie observed in his work An Existentialist Theory:

So long as man is lulled into that contentment-however illusory-which belongs to an existence founded on the world, he is untroubled by ultimate questions about his whence and whither, his why and wherefore-indeed …he avoids such questions. But when the mood of anxiety breaks in to reveal that he is not at home in the supposedly secure world which he has constructed, when everyday existence is disclosed as a life of care terminated by death, the question of existence forces itself upon him.

What represents the sense of security more than the mother, the one who gives us life and nurtures and cares for us with love? The mother dies, life changes, security collapses, anxiety emerges. We must respond, we must care and we must answer the call: the pursuit of authenticity and the potential that resides in that quest.  Barthes did not face the great questions of life and death, meaning and futility, authenticity and inauthenticity. He chose paralysis and constriction over potential and freedom.

According to Heidegger, life is a relationship between what we are in the moment and our potential evolution into our true selves. But we have to care about our lives, about who we are and what we can become. To not care and fail to transform into who we really are is to live an ordinary life, one that we do not control and one that follows the herd of ordinary beings, mindlessly marching into a programmed future.  Heidegger called this “falling.”  Ironically, it is the doxa that Barthes wrote and fought against his entire life. After the death of his mother, Barthes literally fell into his grave.  Barthes, the great thinker who deeply consider the relations between writer and reader, failed to be the author of his own life, it was if he disowned his very existence. His essay Death of the Author becomes prophetic.   

Barthes holds Yorick’s skull in his hand, contemplating  in silence. Perhaps he sees only himself, staring back out of the eyeless dark pits.

Withdrawal, resignation, mourning, defeat and death.

Buddhism and Death

On each branch of the trees in my garden

Hang clusters of fruit, swelling and ripe.

In the end, not one piece will remain.

My mind turns to thoughts of my death.

Seventh Dalai Lama

Buddhism fascinated Barthes and references to Buddhism pervade his writings. We see this in The Neutral, Empire of the Signs, Barthes by Barthes and A Lover’s Discourse. On the back cover of Camera Lucida, Barthes quotes Marpa, a Tibetan Buddhist sage, on the illusory nature of his son’s death. Even though he had a deep and subtle understanding of the linguistic strategies that Zen uses to still the mind and point to the absolute reality,  I have found nothing in Barthes writings to suggest that he had a Buddhist practice.

Siddhartha Gautama was born a prince in the royal Shakya family in Nepal. At the time of his birth, his father’s prophets foretold that he would either become a great king or an enlightened teacher. If Siddhartha were to see the “four sights” (i.e., old age, sickness, death and a wandering ascetic) he would renounce his royal life, become a monk and seek enlightenment.

His father wanted his son to inherit his kingdom rather than to become an impoverished monk. He was worried that, if Siddhartha had any contact with the outside world, he might see the four sights and become a monk. He distracted  his son with a secluded and luxurious life full of riches, glamour and dancing girls in the hope that he  would not wish to venture outside of the palace.

However, Siddhartha became curious about life outside of the palace and took three chariot rides. He saw the four sights and endless human misery. He became filled with an insatiable desire to find the cause of suffering and death. He wanted to learn how mankind can escape samsara-the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. He pursued deep ascetic practices to become enlightened and almost died. Siddhartha attained enlightenment through deep meditation under the Bodhi tree and Buddhism was born.

In his meditations, the Buddha realized that suffering is intrinsic to the human condition. This became the First Noble Truth. He saw that everything in the universe is impermanent; nothing has an independent existence. To grasp our possessions and our lives in an attempt to find permanent peace is to live in a state of delusion. We will lose everything in time and we will suffer over our loss. The  tighter we grasp our lives, the more that we will suffer. Buddhism stresses the importance of accepting impermanence and death and to use them as wisdom teachers.

If we accept that our death is inevitable, the time of death is uncertain, and every moment of our lives is valuable, then we naturally become more focused on our spiritual practice. We learn that life may become preparation for death.

Acceptance of death should not result in our resignation from life or a morbid attitude; rather, it should encourage us to practice the Buddhist way with greater diligence. Since we cannot know the time of our death, we should always be prepared and practice continuously. We should not put it off until the future. Every moment of our lives is precious, and we should use our time wisely. Even though our future lives are determined by our past karmic actions, we can perform meritorious actions, create good karma and be reborn into favorable circumstances.

When we die only the  spiritual wisdom that we have gained in our lives will have value. Our possessions, our accomplishments, our family and friends will vanish in the end, we can take nothing with us on our journey into the unknown.

Considering that suffering and freedom from suffering are the fundamental concerns of Buddhism, Barthes could have turned to practice as a way to work with his suffering and find release. However, he turned to writing and photography  in response to his mother’s death. He wanted to remember his mother by writing Camera Lucida (i.e., to “write a little compilation”) and to resurrect her though the image, the unseen Winter Garden Photograph (i.e., to “recognize” and “rediscover” his mother, to find her “truth” and her “unique being”).

This gave Barthes little comfort. He used words and images to hold on to  his mother. But it was like trying to grasp a fistful of water; the result was only to increase his suffering. Without a spiritual practice, where could he turn? There was no escape. He did not live skillfully from a Buddhist point of view. He did not use a Buddhist practice to resolve his suffering by accepting the loss of his mother and letting her go. He did not use his life to prepare for his death. He was alone. Mourning, despair and resignation were the result.

One of Barthes’ biographers, Louis Jean Calvet, suggested that Barthes had an unconscious attraction to death; perhaps a death wish. After he was hit by a car in Paris crossing the street shortly after the death of his mother, he showed little interest in recovery; he appeared that he had lost the will to live.

Rilke and the Great Sadness

We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside.

Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

In confronting a great sadness that enters our lives we have two choices. We can harden into paralysis and destructive behavior to resist and numb our pain or we can open our hearts to the sadness and allow it to transform us. We can treat our suffering as a gift. We can greet the unknown with strength and hope. This is answering the call and leading an authentic life. It is leading a spiritual life. It is accepting loss, embracing sadness and being open to transformation. It is opening to possibility. It is opening to change. Soft and flexible branches bend in high winds; hard and brittle branches break.

We are not inclined to change: the unknown is frightening and it is painful to leave our old, familiar and secure ways behind. We resist. We are often afraid of the new life that awaits us; we want safety, security and predictability but we know deep in our hearts that this is illusory. There is wisdom in insecurity if we are willing to accept it because it inspires us to change in creative ways to respond.

Stillness, patience and openness are the actions that we must embrace when we are stuck in a great sadness. We must learn to still our minds so that we can hear the soft and subtle voice of wisdom that speaks from the heart. We must be patient; we cannot push the river; we cannot force the voice the speak. We  must be open to receiving the wisdom even if it is something that we do not want to hear. In this way the experience of sadness can enter our hearts and transform us.

In this passage from Letters to a Young Poet, it seems as if Rilke is channeling Heidegger:

You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while you were sad?

Rilke inspires us to understand that the sadness can be a catalyst that transforms us into leading a deeper, wiser and more authentic life. Since the greatest sadness we will experience is the death of our loved ones and of ourselves, the experience and fear of death has the greatest power to force us to change and open the door to greater wisdom and authenticity. We should not resist our suffering because we do not know how it will work in our heart and our life. We must enter the mystery.

To seek security is deluded because change is built into the very fabric of the universe. The universe pulses with the energy of creative aliveness. It never stops flowing, it is an eternal process of becoming, evolving and ending. We must trust that we will emerge from our darkness as stronger and wiser human beings and that the universe will support us. We must hear the call of conscience, accept the mystery of impermanence and change, and evolve into more authentic human beings.

In The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot considers Rilke’s perspective on death which resulted from his experience of the unspeakable horrors of World War I.  In Rilke’s view we should face up to the horror of death rather than attempt to evade it by running away. We must draw death close to ourselves and “overcome” death by creating an experience that is the equal to that of our life. In fact, our death becomes a part of our life. This is the ultimate artistic action.

Rilke contemplates the act of suicide in his poetry. He sees that the notion of impatience is intrinsic to suicide. The person who is considering suicide is impatient for the death that awaits us all; they cannot wait for it nor can they bear the uncertainty of not knowing when it will happen. Propelled by trauma they accelerate the occurrence of the event.

Rilke views the act of impatience as an offense against suffering and the wisdom that it can bring. Blanchot writes:

Impatience is also an offense against suffering: by refusing to suffer the frightful, by eluding the unbearable, one eludes the moment when everything reverses and the greatest danger becomes the essential security. The impatience in voluntary death is this refusal to wait to reach the pure center where we would find our bearings again in that which exceeds us. Why did you not wait until the burden became unbearable: then it reverses itself and is only so heavy because it is so pure.

The Space of Literature

This unbearable suffering is like the bellows that blasts air into the flames; the temperature of the heat is increased, the impurities are transformed into smoke and only the pure gold remains. We are purified by the heat. We begin anew.

To die before our time is to suggest a failure of attention to life and death. We are strangers to the true experience of our death. If we are too willing to die or too inattentive to the state of our lives and the fact of our death, we obfuscate our death by casting the shadow of desire upon it. Our desire to die before our time clouds our ability to experience death. Our death becomes a distracted death; one in which we are not present. It is not our unique death that we experience as a part of our creative, authentic life; it is a banal death, an ordinary, trivial, thing, like a generic object mass-produced in a factory.

This leads us to consider whether death has quality. Is there such a thing as a good death or a bad death? Blanchot observes that the question is whether we wish to die an authentic or inauthentic death; one that is good and true or one that is bad and false; one in which we pay attention to the profundity of the event or we miss it due to our inattention. What quality of death do we wish to experience? What quality of life do we want to create? These two questions are inextricable like two sides of a coin.

Since death is the most profound experience of our lives and death and life cannot be separated, we should consider deeply the question of the quality of our death. Nietzsche wrote of the desire for a quality death:

He dies his death, victorious, who accomplishes it himself. “But detestable . . . is your grimacing death, which advances in its belly like a thief.” “If not, your death will suit you ill.”

All of this means that we should want to die in our own time and in our own way. We recognize that the angel of death can take us by the hand and lead us away when he wishes but, nevertheless, we should strive to die an individual, personal death, rather than a generic, anonymous death. We should desire to die a noble, distinguished and honorable death rather than to just “pass away”. We should prepare ourselves by living the right way to create a quality death.

Rilke, in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, contemplated an impersonal death that arises from the anonymous existence that many of us experience by living in the big cities. Blanchot observes:

In fact, Malte’s anguish has more than a little to do with the anonymous existence of big cities–to that distress which makes vagrants of some, men fallen out of themselves and out of the world, already dead of an unwitting death never to be achieved.

This leads to an insignificant live and a banal death. Death becomes mass produced and of no more importance than “taking a drink of water or cutting off the head of a cabbage”.

This is an anonymous death, devoid of originality, value, quality, or authenticity. It is death not infused with the quality of life. Death becomes common, sterile. Blanchot writes:

Mass-produced death, ready-made in bulk for all and in which each disappears hastily; death as an anonymous product, an object without value, like the things of the modern world which Rilke always rejected: if only from these comparisons one sees how he slips from death’s essential neutrality to the idea that this neutrality is but an historical and temporary form of death, the sterile death of big cities.

Is there another way? Can we construct a life with a view to the end game of an authentic death, a death of quality, one that is person and reflect the experience of our unique true self? Is the search for an authentic death linked to the creative enterprise of the artist? I creating our authentic death our obligation as a living human being and as an artist? Is the purpose of our life to create an artwork out of our lives, almost performance art, so that our live and death become a living canvas, the great existential artwork, the grand project that ends in the black void, like unexposed photo paper left in the sun? How will we know how our life artwork will be judged? Who are the critics and what are their standards? We will be unable to judge the quality of our life and our death because we will have no more perception, nor more potentiality, no more sensation, no more consciousness.

If we are to be the artists of our live and death, we must exert agency over the time and circumstance of our death; our end cannot be an accident that arrives unannounced and unseen, otherwise our artwork will be incomplete. Our project is loaded with uncertainty and risk of failure; we cannot negotiate with the angel of death, but we have no choice. We must accept the risk and the struggle and create an authentic death and life to support it. On this point, Blanchot writes:

Death must exist for me not only at the very last moment, but as soon as I begin to live and in life’s intimacy and profundity. Death would thus be part of existence, it would draw life from mine, deep within. It would be made of me and, perhaps, for me, as a child is the child of its mother.

We now see that death is a part of life, they are the yin and the yang of existence, they are both part of the universal duality which, although opposites, cannot be separate and are whole if we could slip below the appearance and perceive the reality. The choice becomes mine. I can die a great death, one that is authentic and creative and reflects my unique self. I can see life as a preparation for death and live accordingly. This is the source of true meaning of life. This is my work. Rilke, in his says of such a death:

. . . it was a death which good work
had profoundly formed, this proper death
which has so great a need of us because we live it, and to which we are never nearer than here.

Or I can choose to live an inauthentic life, anonymous and die like the solitary fly buzzing futilely until it falls at last onto the window sill, a still, silent and black thing. Blanchot so elegant wrote:

We must be the figurers and the poets of our death.

Let us turn briefly to Tibetan Buddhism which has much to say on the topic of death. We should note that Barthes quotes Marpa, who was a teacher who brought the teachings from India to Tibet in the Middle Ages, on the back cover of Camera Lucida.

From its beginnings, Buddhism has stressed the importance of death, since awareness of death as one of the four sights (i.e., an old man, a sick man, a holy man and a dead man)is what prompted the Buddha to perceive the futility of worldly concerns and pleasures. He resolved to renounce world affairs and to devote himself to becoming awakened and ultimately transcended death. Buddhism places a strong emphasis on practices concerning death, and its literature has many warnings to be aware of the inevitability of death, the rarity of a human birth and the opportunities it presents to resolve past karmas and the great value of mindfulness of death. If we recognize the inevitability of death and face up to the fact of our death, then it is natural that we would become more dedicated on our spiritual practice. Because the time and circumstances of our death are unknown to us, we must make every moment of our lives count. This is in contrast to the values of Western society in which people chase after such pleasures as wealth, power and fame because we think they will bring us happiness.

However, they are impermanent; nothing lasts. Since we will loose all of our pleasures, they will inevitably bring us suffering. We cannot avoid seeing that even the people who have the most amount of these pleasures inevitably succumb to old age, sickness and death. We avoid discussing and seeing death; we send the aged into rest homes and focus our attention on the pleasures to distract ourselves from the ugliness, uncertainty and fear of death. John Powers, a Buddhist scholar, writes:

Discussions of death and impermanence are found in every facet ofTibetan Buddhist teaching, and any student dent who tries to overlook them is soon reminded that dharma practice requires a poignant awareness of death. Buddhist doctrines emphasize the idea that although one’s destiny is always influenced by past karma, every person has the ability to exercise free will and influence the course of both life and death. We all shape our own destinies, and in every moment there are opportunities for spiritual advancement. According to many Buddhist texts, death presents us with a range of important possibilities for progress.

John Powers, Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism

The quality of our lives, measured by merit or good karma in Tibetan terms, directly determines the circumstances of our rebirth. Therefore we must lead a virtuous life to prepare for our next life. Powers describes this as:

The state of mind of a dying person is vitally important in determining what sort of rebirth that person will have. If a person has strongly negative thoughts at the time of death-thoughts of anger, resentment, hatred, and so on-this can erase the effects of a lifetime of virtuous conduct and lead to a rebirth characterized by suffering. By contrast, a person who generates positive thoughts at the time of death can reverse a lifetime’s negativities and bring about a better rebirth. Of course, it is best to engage in religious practice throughout out one’s life, since this sort of training is more likely to be effective at the time of death…

John Powers, Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism

From the perspective of Western philosophy and Tibetan esoteric religious doctrine we have the same profound realization: we must view life and death in a wholistic way; we must include our death within our life and to learn its secret truths. Can we make death the other side of life and use it as a pathway to wisdom? Awareness of the impermanence of life and the inevitability of our death will expand the quality of our lives. This will in turn determine the quality of our next life. Even though life and death appear to be a duality, it is false, it is an illusion, beneath the appearance, they are one.

Blanchot understands this and references the Bardo Thodol (the Tibetan Book of the Dead). He describes how the state of mind of the person in the process of dying influences his future life. If the person sees the clear light and the peaceful deities then he may be reborn into a pure life. However, if he sees the angry deities then he may fall back into a dark existence. He then links this to Rilke’s thought:

It is to a similar purification during life itself that Rilke calls us, with the difference that death is not the denunciation of the illusory appearances in which we live, but forms a whole with life, forms the generous space of the two domains’ unity. Confidence in life and, for life’s sake, in death: if we refuse death it is as if we refused the somber and difficult sides of life. It is as if we sought to welcome in life only its minimal parts. So, then, would our pleasures be minimal. “Whoever does not consent to the frightful in life and does not greet it with cries of joy never enters into possession of the inexpressible powers of our life. He remains marginal. When the time for judgment comes, he will have been neither alive nor dead.

Was Barthes Transformed by the Death of His Mother?

Here again is the Winter Garden Photograph. I am alone with it, in front of it. The circle is closed, there is no escape. I suffer, motionless. Cruel, sterile deficiency: I cannot transform my grief, I cannot let my gaze drift.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Camera Lucida is a book of death and mourning. It is Barthes’ attempt to find comfort and union with his dead mother through photography.  It is his response to the “great sadness” of his loss.

He begins the book with the goal of searching for the essence of photography but he was deceiving himself (or perhaps us); he was really searching for his mother.  He realizes (or admits ) this fact at the end of Part I when he writes  that he had learned how his desire worked but had not found the nature of photography. He recants  Part I and, in Part II, writes  its palinode.

Part II opens with  Barthes  looking through his collection of photographs in the hope of “finding” his mother. She was the animating spirit of his life and he was compelled to resurrect her. It was a matter of Barthes’ very survival that he do so; this is why his desire was “ontological.” Citing Proust he observes that he does not expect to find her through photographs because they support recollection even less than unaided memory. He then considers writing “a little compilation” as a way to preserve her memory but instead, writes a book about photography philosophy which is intertwined with a reminiscence of his mother, death and mourning.  He observes that photographs of her beloved objects (a powder box, a crystal flagon, handbags) help him “find” his mother.  Later in Camera Lucida, Barthes considers dreams, objects and smells as triggers of memory. It was a “painful labor” but he was under a compulsion.

Eventually he finds the “truth” of his mother in a single image-the famous Winter Garden Photograph. He observes that it gave him a remembrance as strong as that experienced by Proust when he saw his grandmother’s “true face” as a living and complete memory when he was taking off his boots. The Winter Garden Photograph seemed to perfectly reflect both the truth of his mother and his suffering over her death. It showed the truth of her “unique being”. The  result was that one image, the photograph, triggered another image, the memory.

Even though the Winter Garden Photograph triggered memories of the truth of his mother, it could never resurrect her in the flesh; he would never hold her again; images never create physicality: they are incorporeal, ethereal, transitory, distorted imprints of the past, limited by being perceived only with the sense of sight, inevitably corrupted by distortions of our memories caused by the operation of time.

Barthes is not seeking to find meaning in the face of the inescapable reality of his mother’s death.  He is not looking for a wisdom teaching to arise from his suffering; he is not looking for transformation. He only sees despair, paralysis, resignation and death: his mother’s and his own. When he finds a photograph of his mother as a little girl he suffers through two deaths: the death of the little girl and the death of the aged mother. Death upon death.

Barthes becomes  motionless, stuck, leading a life without quality, an inauthentic life, a life waiting for death. He learns how to mourn but he does  not learn how to live.

Even though Barthes was full of anxiety about death, he  does not hear Heidegger’s call of conscience and move  toward authenticity. He does not follow the Buddhist way of accepting impermanence as inherent in the very fabric of the universe, and as the true cause of creativity through destruction and renewal. He does not consider Rilke’s “great sadness” as a catalyst for creating an authentic death, a quality death, a unique and creative death. Blanchot and Rilke reacted strongly against the banal death, the ordinary, anonymous death. What could be more banal than getting hit by a car crossing a Parisian street and dying in a hospital a month later?

Should we condemn his resignation, his paralysis, his failure to hear the calling to authenticity? Should we criticize his failure to practice the Buddhist way of acceptance of impermanence loss and to use suffering as a wisdom teacher? Should we fault his failure to fight for his life after being hit by a car and to die an ordinary and banal death in a hospital? In The Neutral, a collection of lectures that was published  after Camera Lucida, Barthes obliquely refers to his mother’s death and then he gives it no further mention. Was he in denial, was he suppressing his suffering through work?  Did he give up and wish do die? We will never know.

On the other hand, out of his loss he gave us Camera Lucida: a great novella of philosophical, literary and poetic art, a fascinating and complex work.

In Camera Lucida, Barthes compares  the Winter Garden Photograph to Schumann’s the Songs of Dawn. Schumann wrote Songs of Dawn at the end of his life when he was confined in a mental institution and descending into insanity and suicide. Barthes compares  photograph compared to a musical composition. For Barthes, the Songs of Dawn “accorded” with his mother’s being and his grief at her death. Barthes lived to suffer; there was no escape, the circle was closed, he was motionless. Perhaps he did not want to escape. In the Mourning Diary we find:

I live in my suffering and that makes me happy. Anything that keeps me from living in my suffering is unbearable to me.

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

To answer Derrida’s question: Barthes lived in suffering. He could not imagine or bear living any other way.

The Dead Boats

The bottom of the boat is unseen. Does the boat have a hull or has it collapsed into a skeletal frame? Is the water pooled in the bottom of the boat the same as the water in the canal?

In the water pooled in the bottom of the boat weeds grow. The dead boat is a container for the water that nourishes the weeds. Death supports life.

Are the weeds a reflection in the water of weeds on the shore or are they growing in the water pooled in the bottom of the boat?

Gashes. Horizontal scores in the weathered grey wood mark time. Tennis shoes. Wet, muddy, molding and floating with the crushed cans, cigarettes, plastic bags and dead leaves in the water pooled in the bottom of the boat. Who owned them and why were they thrown into the boat? Was it a crime, a drunk, a joke, a loss, a liaison?

Chains. The boat is chained to the brown brick canal wall. Imprisoned. The chains are in sharp focus but the boat, the water pooled in the bottom of the boat and the reflections in the water are blurry, soft and indistinct.

Shadow. A shadow of a man on a brown brick canal wall next to a boat. Where is he going and what is his story? Did he break the chains?

What is unseen? The bottom of the boat. The muddy residue on the bottom of the water pooled in the bottom of the boat. The muddy residue on the bottom of the canal. The muck in the residue. Death is unseen.

What lies at bottom of the canal? Seabottles, seawrack, rotted sogged wood, rusted metal, saltjunk and dead boats. The incrustations of salt time. Muck in the residue.

Useless, alone, failed, broken, lost, abandoned, drowning, sunken.The boat does not fulfill their function. It does not float. It does not transport us to the other shore.

Chained and imprisoned. Broken masts and torn sails. Captured by the canals, dying in time, never to sail again, never free on the open sea.

Rusted, molded, scarred, pierced, dented, broken. Punctured and wounded. Lacerated.

The boat is submerged in the water. It inhabits a world above the water and below the water. It exists in a liminal space. It floats in the twilight. Plants grow in the mud.

As above, so below.

The water pooled in the bottom of the boat is yellow with algae. It is murky with dirt and rainbows of oil. Sulfurous. It does not flow like the water in the canals. It is stagnant: poisonous, dead. The dead  waters.

The boats are drowning. Gasping  to breathe.

Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind would lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters.

James Joyce, Ulysses

The water in the canal flows with the tides. It is refreshed by the river. Ebb and flow, in and out, high and low. Sunlight on cold water.

Plants grow in the mud. Are they like the lotus? The lotus is the purifying spirit that grows out of the water pooled in the bottom of the boat that is murky with oil and dirt. The lotus blossom floats above the muddy water but is nourished by it. It grows from the mud to the sky to show us the pathway to enlightenment. It reaches for the light. Buddha sits on the lotus. Enlightenment ends suffering by achieving Buddha mind.

The boat exists in liminal space. Between life and death, sun and moon, breath and breathless, sunlight and shadow, water and air, floating and submerging, above and below. Between the state of ignorance and wisdom, avidya and viveka.

Only the ethereal. Where dreamy creamy gull waves o’er the waters dull.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Scylla and Charybdis, matter and spirit, rocks and water, stability and chaos. Navigate the boat between the lesser of the two risks, careful not to perish on one or the other.

The boat rocks gently slapping water against the hull and mind stills and dreams sail and the world turns into shimmering light waves of evanescent forms. Reflections from the great void of the night sea: emptiness is the source of all form.

Unseen boat decomposes in the mud in the bottom of the canals and returns to the water. Decay and return, from the separateness of the form of the boat to the unity of a drop of water in the canal. Duality to non-duality.

Arthur Rimbaud in his  poem The Drunken Boat wrote:

Thenceforward, fused in the poem, milk of stars,

Of the sea, I coiled through depths of cloudless green,

Where, dimly, they come swaying down,

Rapt and sad, singly, the drowned;

Where, under the sky’s hemorrhage, slowly tossing

In thuds of fever, arch-alcohol of song,

Pumping over the blues in sudden stains,

The biter redness of love ferment.

B. THE SECOND FORM OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TIME

Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge, which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution. When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind.

J. Krishnamurti, The Core of the Teachings

And when he recognized the man who had trailed him since the underground camp, he understood there was no way to escape Time.

Chris Marker, Le Jetee

Every determinate thing is a combination of singularities, forming a multiplicity that is changing in multiple ways according to the syntheses of time.

James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time-A Critical Introduction and Guide

That Has Been and The States of Time

In Camera Lucida, Barthes is searching for that singular quality that belongs exclusively to photography and distinguishes it from the “community of images”.  Even though he has resisted reductionism throughout his life, he proceeds to reduce the photograph to two qualities: studium and punctum. The punctum is that detail or point within a photograph that pricks, bruises or wounds the observer. It is a detail that triggers a strong emotional reaction or resonance with the observer.  In medical terms, the punctum refers to the tear duct. Camera Lucida is a work of mourning, of tears shed over the lost mother.

Barthes states that punctum is also time:

This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (“that-has-been”), its pure representation.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Photography only captures  the past, that has been, which is “lacerating” because the passage of time always results in death and decay.  The laceration, the jagged wound, is death and mourning over the loss of a loved one. We see this reference to “laceration” in Mourning Diary:

And yet—more than ever, in this pure air, I begin crying when I think of maman’s words that always lacerate me: my R! my R! (I’ve never been able to tell this to anyone).

Roland  Barthes, Mourning Diary

Time is death. Everything ages, decays and dies in time. The photograph shows us a person who was once alive but is now dead. It looks ahead to the future death of the person who was alive when the photograph was taken. The photograph represents two deaths: a past and a future death.

The truth about mourning is quite simple: now that maman is dead, I am faced with death (nothing any longer separates me from it except time).

Roland  Barthes, Mourning Diary

As time passes, the photograph decays, the observer ages and memory of the referent (i.e., the thing photographed) fades. The photograph, the observer and the referent exist in a dance with death, time and memory. This reminds me of Edvard Munch’s painting The Dance of Life. It is a slow dance, a macabre dance, a dance of despair, the faces of the dancers wearing death masks, ghostly green faces, forlorn onlookers wearing black, the moonlight reflected on cold waters.

We never perceive the perfect present, we live in the past. The temporal gap between an event, the perception of the event by our senses and the interpretation of the event by our minds always exists. Even traveling at the speed of light, information is transmitted through time. Our perception of the world lags its events happening in “real time”.

We can never make a photograph in the perfect present. The elapsed time it takes for light to travel from the referent to the camera, the processing time of the film or sensor, and the synaptic lapses in our neural circuits when we see the image in the viewfinder of the camera create a temporal gap between the perfect present, our perception of the referent and the recording of the image by the camera.

There are four dimensions of time: a past, a present, a future and a timeless state. Can our conception of photography be broadened to reflect more than just a device that records the past? If photography can capture temporal dimensions other than the past, it can escape its association with death. We can imagine that photographers may become creators of life rather than agents of death.

The universe is made of light, time, space, and form.  Light is the universal constant, a quanta that transmits information, imprints the optical image on the film by chemical reaction (or activates the camera’s sensor), strikes our retina and stimulates a virtual image that arises in our consciousness. The camera’s shutter controls time, its aperture focuses light and both together regulate the quanta of light that strikes the film or sensor. The essence of photography is found within the mysteries of light and time; it is a much more subtle and complex problem than Barthes’ reductionism (which he abhorred) which merely established that the referent existed in the past, that there is a temporal gap between the date of the photograph and the date the observer views the photograph, with death often occurring during the interval, and that the photograph is a predicate for memory and mourning.

Cameras began as primitive devices that recorded images on chemically coated plates. Time was absolute, the camera recorded referents that only existed in the past, and three-dimensional form (width, depth and height) was reduced to a two-dimensional print. This is a Newtonian view of the world. Are we bound to conceive of the photograph in this way? Must we be imprisoned within this banality?

The advances in physics and technology since the time of Niepce are almost unimaginable. We have moved from the invention of the light bulb to quantum computing in a generation.

We have cameras that can capture trillions of frames per second; the effective exposure time is two trillionth of a second. We can capture images around corners. With new advances in computational photography, the potential is limitless.

Can we use philosophy to inspire us to imagine a new world of photography that is made possible by developments in technology? For example, Henri Bergson, Giles Deleuze and Albert Einstein have created extraordinarily rich and complex models of memory, perception, time and cosmology. Can we use their discoveries to reimagine photography?

Can a camera capture the present?

Can a camera capture the future?

Can a camera capture the timeless state?

Can a camera capture three dimensional volume?

Can a camera capture memory?

Can a camera capture spacetime?

Banality, Singularity, and  the Unanswered Question

In Camera Lucida Barthes speaks with two voices: the voice of banality and the voice of singularity (his unique emotional voice to overcome his fear of expressing banality).

Lewis Payne was a conspirator in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and was condemned to death. The photograph of Lewis Payne reproduced in Camera Lucida was taken in April, 1865. He is shown sitting in front of a steel hull of a ship. He is handsome and heroic. He was later hanged in July, 1865. The future execution of Payne in July was anticipated in the then present moment in April, when the photograph was taken.  The photograph shows both the then present and suggests or anticipates the future when Payne would be hanged.

From the point of view of our present in 2018 (when I first wrote these words), Payne was alive in April when the photograph was taken, died after he was hanged in July and has been dead for over 150 years. The present and its future as reflected in the photograph collapse into our past. As I edit my manuscript in 2021, I note that Payne’s death, Payne’s photograph and my writing about this image have receded into the past by another three years. The shifting tenses dizzy my consciousness, much as Barthes noted in Camera Lucida.

This will be and that has been. Payne will be hanged and Payne has been hanged. The photograph shows us a life that existed in its present and anticipated a death that occurred in its future. Both occurred in our past.

That has been. The thing has been placed before the camera as a condition to making a photograph of the think. This is the punctum, the essence of photography. Barthes calls this the interfuit.  What he sees in the image has been before the camera. The thing is present when the photograph was taken but it is already in the past.

Barthes looks at a photograph of his mother as a child and realizes that she is going to die and, in fact, has died. He experiences this truth of photography with shuddering horror.

How are these observations not the voice of banality? They are founded on mourning rather than philosophy. Barthes concedes that reducing the essence of photography to providing evidence that the thing (the referent) in the photograph existed and that it grows older as time passes is banal. This is something that even a child knows.

Barthes struggles to find his singular voice to resolve the issue he frames as the reason for writing Camera Lucida: to discover the eidos or Form of photography.  He knows that reducing the essence of photography to providing evidence that the thing (the referent) grows older as time passes is obvious and trivial. He knows there is more to photography than the production of images that have since passed.

Camera Lucida is structured in two parts: an ode in Part One and a palinode in Part Two.  At the end of Part One, Barthes admits that he has not found the answer to the question he presents in Part One. In Part Two he changes course and writes a palinode, a rejection, a recantation of Part One. Photography becomes a vehicle for Barthes to mourn and process the death of his mother.  He cannot imagine a life without his mother; there is no escape from suffering and the future holds nothing but death. Only a few months separates the death of his mother from his own death. Barthes struggles to live and to write. He feels his labors are futile and he compares himself to Sisyphus. In Mourning Diary he writes:

Began the day by looking at her photographs. A cruel mourning begins again (but had never ended). To begin again without resting. Sisyphus.

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

Perhaps his work was futile? Is this why he closed Camera Lucida with the unanswered question:

Such are the two ways of the Photograph. The choice is mine: to subject its spectacle to the civilized code of perfect illusions, or to confront in it the wakening of intractable reality.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

We are caught in Barthes’ duality of illusion and reality.  Is this the right question to ask? Is a duality the right way to frame of the question?

Insight, illumination and truth resides in the ambiguities, the uncertainties, the fluctuations between the dualities and beyond the dualities. Can we outplay the dualities by using the operations that Barthes articulated in The Neutral? Is there a new paradigm?  Can we transcend the dualities and find the unity beneath the dualities? How do we escape the dualistic trap that Barthes sets for us at the end of Camera Lucida?

A singularity is when all of the laws of math and physics have broken down. Matter and gravity become infinite, a black hole forms, and light, time and knowledge collapse into the darkness of infinite mass. Nothing escapes, not even light nor the information that it contains.  Is there a photographic singularity at the center of the labyrinth of Camera Lucida?  Does the Form of photography collapse into the center of the labyrinth, into a singularity, into darkness where no light or information escapes, an unfathomable place without images? Could this be death?

I am willing to enter the labyrinth and become lost. But I will not speak with the voice of banality.  I would rather fail, fly too close to the sun and perish in the sea; I would rather be a brushstroke in the corner of Breughel’s great painting of Icarus. I search to find my singular and authentic voice.  I search to find the essence, the Form, of photography.

Breaking Free From That Has Been; My Singularity

According to Barthes, photographs are evidence that something existed in front of the lens (the referent) that was necessary to make the photograph. The referent was absolutely, irrefutably present; without it the photograph would not exist; it would be an image of nothing, a blank image.  The referent adheres to the photograph as if they are glued together. The photograph is proof (much like a legal certificate) of the existence of the referent. The referent was present, the photograph was taken but now the referent resides in the past as the future moves to the present and the present moves to the past. For Barthes, the essence of photography is the past: that has been.

That has been does not consider what the image means. To view photography as a system for documenting the existence of a referent as existing in the past is meaningless without understanding whether the image is true. We know the photograph shows us the referent as it existed in the past but we may not know what it means. Was the referent a stage set, a simulation, a manipulation, a construction? What lies outside of the frame that may change the meaning of the image? Was the image created by an artist as a lie to show us a truth about photography?  Or was it a lie to show a lie? As we will see, photographs lie and they lie convincingly. The notion of evidence has no meaning unless it is used to establish the truth of something else. If a photograph shows us the truth of the referent, then what does the referent mean? To show its mere existence is not to establish its truth.

To view a photograph as a frozen slice of time that recedes into the past and as evidence that a thing existed is a tired cliche that I find abhorrent. This is obvious and boring, as Barthes recognized. It avoids the complex question of the ontology of photography and reduces the inquiry to the trite observation that a photograph’s existence depends upon its referent and it always resides in the past. The irony is that Barthes, who rejected the notion of reductiveness throughout his life, reduces photography to either a series of dualities (studium and punctum, illusion and reality, etc.) or to an illustration of a metaphorical death.

The struggle to find my singularity in the face of Barthes’ banalities defeats me. I cannot find my way out of them.  I am lost in the labyrinth. I am imprisoned.

I must break free from “that has been” and its finality. I struggle to find a new theory of photography that is founded upon advanced scientific discoveries in our understanding of time, light and space, and modern concepts of philosophy.  As our understanding of science and philosophy becomes deeper and more complex, the meaning of photography and its potential to make new images also must evolve.  New theories cannot be reductive and obvious.  They must lead to a more complex and nuanced understanding of the meaning of the image, and an expansion of the medium’s potential to create new images, perhaps images that have never been seen before.

I labor over this seemingly endless and impossible task but I am not like Sisyphus. I find both suffering and joy in my work. I struggle to climb the mountain, I am starved for air, I cannot eat, my body fails and yet I persevere. I take that last pull on the rope to arrive at the summit. I survey the horizon and I inhale and exhale the breath of the universe. My mind stills, I enter the timeless state and I experience a profound moment of joy.  And yet, I know that I must descend and climb the mountain yet again.

I stand with Camus: I work and I struggle. I am patient. I accept the absurdity of the  project. I rebel. I work with joy. I will not perform futile labor, nor will I labor in a state of despair.

Consider this:

A photograph is an interpretation, a performance, a narrative, an exploration, a meta-question. A photograph should not be restricted to a two-dimensional image on paper that is trapped in the past like a fly in amber; it may be expressed as a hologram, as a sculpture, as a projection, as a performance, as an intervention, as part of an intertextual work.

I want to photograph the present and the future. I want to photograph the timeless state. I want to photograph life and death, not just death. I want to photograph images that reflect spacetime. I want to discover a new paradigm for photography. I want to go beyond death, time and memory. I want to find my singular, creative and authentic voice.

Two Photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge; Integritas

But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as onewhole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas.

James Joyce, A Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man

I walk beneath the Brooklyn bridge as the sun is setting. I take a photograph of the bridge. It shows the vast steel standards, the arches, the cables, the great span across the river and the buildings of Manhattan. An hour later, twilight; its the liminal time, the time between light and dark. The sun has set, the light has fallen. I take another photograph of the bridge from the same location. Now only the outline of the bridge is visible; the details are lost in the dark.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited, Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

Hart Crane, The Bridge: To Brooklyn Bridge.

The appearance of the bridge and the resulting photograph based upon its appearance has changed even though the physical structure of the bridge has not. When is the true bridge? Where is the true bridge? What does the true bridge look like? Does the true bridge look like both photographs combined? Or is the true bridge the sum of innumerable photographs each taken 1/1000 of a second apart since the beginning of the construction of the bridge to the present? If I reduce the shutter speed to shorter durations of time, I could make an almost infinite number of images of the bridge. And must I continue to photograph the bridge as the present moves to the past? And where do I place the camera, what perspective on the bridge should I use? How do I display an almost infinite collection of images to create a composite image of the truth of the bridge?

To capture the truth of the bridge, the camera must take images of the bridge from all angles and all perspectives.

To capture the truth of the bridge, the camera must capture all coordinates of space and time.

A year later, I print the two photographs of the bridge that I took an hour before sunset and at sunset. I lay them on my desk and study them. I remember taking the photographs and the way the bridge and the river looked.  I remember the weather, the river and the vertical, muscular thrust of downtown Manhattan up into the clouds. I remember how I felt looking at the bridge.

As I study the photographs, time continues to flow and it pushes both images further into the past. There is a one hour gap between the two images. Both images move into the past at the same rate.  The images say something about the way the bridge looked in the past and one hour earlier in the past. What lives in this temporal gap and is this gap constant over time?

What happened during the one hour gap ? I imagine traffic flowing over the bridge, people on the boardwalk taking pictures, ferries traversing the river, helicopters in the skies, clouds forming, floating and dissolving: life movement change form flow.

What is happening here? What is the essence of these photographs? Escape the banality to find the singularity. These photographs are about time, space, form and light. These two photographs say nothing about how the bridge looks now, in the present moment, when I write these words which have already become the past. And they say very little about the way the bridge looked in the past other than to document that the bridge indeed existed. There are an infinite number of bridges: all true, all are existing in the past of the bridge from the moment of the beginning of construction of the bridge to the present and then into the future.

I now see that the essence of the bridge is all of its parts as they existed from the beginning of its construction, through to the present and into the far future when, someday, the bridge will collapse or be rebuilt. All perspectives, all images, all times across the history of the bridge from beginning to end, is the true span of the bridge. This is integritas; this is the whole bridge.

I now see that a single photograph cannot represent the truth of the whole bridge. It shows me very little; it is just one image of the bridge from one perspective as it appeared at a single point in time. There are an almost infinite number of images that could have been taken over the history of the bridge. All are needed to show the truth of the whole bridge but even then they would lie. This is because of the operation of the inescapable fact that photographs always reduce the three-dimensional referent into a two dimensions image. From steel to paper. The result is always an interpretation, a distortion, a reduction, a lie.

The Arrow of Time

Time marks the duration between two events.

Time marks the opening and the closing of the camera’s shutter.

Time is measured by a clock.

Time is absolute.

This is the meaning of time as understood by Aristotle and Newton.

Time seems to flow from the future, through the present and then to the past. As each moment passes, everything changes. People are born, live and die. Physical forms decay into dust. Everything is changing, even though things may change at  different rates. This is the arrow of time that we perceive in our ordinary lives.

The arrow of time defines the conventional view of photography. We take a photograph of the referent in the present, the present immediately slips into the past and the photograph shows us a slice of time, frozen. That has been. We view the photograph in the here and now but it shows us what has been, there and then, both temporal states continuously and irrevocably slipping into the past. The photograph always slips into the past.

Why does the arrow of time seem to point in only one direction?

Can we stop the arrow of time in mid-air, suspended, motionless?

Can we reverse the arrow of time?

Can we break the arrow of time?

If we can change the arrow of time then, perhaps, we can liberate photography from the past, and allow it to create images of the present, the future and the timeless state.

Reasons for the Arrow of Time

There are three reasons for the arrow of time. The first is based on thermodynamics. If we start from any higher order organized state, the overall disorderliness in the system-entropy-always increases over time. Entropy moves in only one way. The entropy of the universe always increases. Disorder always prevails. Energy always dissipates. There are more ways for the universe to be disordered than ordered. Heat flows from hot to cold, never from cold to hot. We never see a broken egg gather on the kitchen floor to re-form as a whole egg. We never see smoke, ash and fire re-assemble into wood. Time moves in the same direction as entropy.

The second reason is psychological. Our sense of time seems to flow in one direction, which is why we remember the past and not the future. We anticipate but never remember the future; we remember but never anticipate the past. We know things about the past but not about the future; we feel we can change our future but we cannot change our past. There is a perfect correlation between the psychological orientation of our lives and the direction of time. Stephen Hawking said that our brain measures time in a way in which disorder increases in the direction of time. We never observe it working in the opposite direction. In other words, the psychological arrow of time is intertwined with the thermodynamic arrow of time.

The third reason is cosmological. The cosmological arrow of time points in the direction of the universe’s expansion. This comes from the big bang theory of the creation of the universe. Time began with the big bang. The direction of time is in the same direction in which the universe is expanding. The direction of the third arrow is dependent on the continuous expansion of the universe. If the universe started to contract, the arrow of time could change direction.

Time Is Neither a River Nor a Metaphor

Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths

We think of time as a river that sweeps us downstream into the future. The river is always changing, it is never the same.  We are always changing, we are never the same. We cannot step in the same river twice, as Heraclitus said.

Contrary to the popular metaphor, time is not like a river. If time flows like a river, how fast does it flow and how do we measure its speed? The speed of the river is relative to what? We can measure the speed of the river from the bank or we can get in a boat, float downstream and measure the speed of the river. If we are on the bank, we see that the river flows, the bank is stationary. If we are in the boat, the bank moves, but the river is stationary. This is the beginning of relativity.

Nabokov said that time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors. Time is something that we can loose, save, possess or waste. Time is like money (we spend or save time), it is like a road (a long and winding), a path (twisted), a thread (memories), a tide (eternal movement), a ladder (management), and an arrow (pointing in one direction).  All of these statements are only metaphors that say nothing truthful about time. Time is not like a river.

Stone Faced Buddha, Incense, Flowers and Candles; Timeless Images

At the Fire Lotus Temple in Brooklyn, I sit before the altar.  It is the beginning of sesshin which is a three day intensive meditational period.  On the altar is a stone faced Buddha, an incense stick, a candle and a vase of flowers. Before I settle in and drop mind, I consider time. Time is movement. Time is change. If I take a photograph at the beginning of sesshin and three days later at its end, I will see that the incense has burned to ash, the candle has melted and the flower petals have fallen on the altar. Entropy increases. I see movement and change in the photographs. I see the gap between present and past. I see time passing as surely as the clock, the calendar and the moon show me that time is passing. I see the arrow of time in these photographs.

The stone faced Buddha does not move. It does not change. It exists outside of time. For the stone faced Buddha there is no elapsed time, there is no gap between present and past. The photographs of the stone faced Buddha taken at the beginning of sesshin and at the end of sesshin are the same.  If the sesshin were a thousand years long, the photographs of the stone faced Buddha taken at the beginning and at the end of the period would be the same. Flowers fall, wax drips, incense burns to ashes before the stone faced Buddha. The arrow of time shatters on the stone faced Buddha. The wood shaft splinters, decays to dust. Stone prevails.

The stone faced Buddha exists out of time.  It does not decay like the incense, flowers and candles. Incense, flowers and candles are decaying, biological clocks. Watching the incense stick turn to ash, the candle wax drip and the petals fall is like watching the hands of a clock marking the endless turning of time. Photographs of the stone faced Buddha do not show the passing of time. The Buddha does not move and change, time relative to Buddha does not move, the clock is stopped. For all practical purposes, the Buddha is permanent and timeless; it will remain the same long after I am gone.

We meditate on the Buddha to still our butterfly minds (which are always fluttering from present to past to future) and enter the timeless state. We do not meditate on the incense, candle or flowers. They are placed on the altar to remind us of impermanence. Permanence and impermanence are co-existing on the altar.

Two arrows meet in mid-air. The arrows shatter. The moment of collision is the timeless state.  The timeless state interests me. Photographs that show the timeless state interest me. Photographs that are at once in time and out of time interest me. Photographs that are out of time all together interest me. Shattered photographs interest me.

Consider the clouds reflected in the water in the canals. Clouds move endlessly. Water flows constantly. Water clouds dance. Water sparkles sunlight. Wind, rain, clouds, sunlight: they exist in time and they exist outside of time. They move and change in time but their time cannot be measured or marked on the water: there they have no reference point. A photograph of water clouds or sunlight reflections taken today and one taken a year ago and one taken next year are all the same in their essence. There is nothing in the photographs to show the movement of time. Photographs may stop the dance of the water clouds and the sunlight water and reduce them to a static image but the reflections dance in their own time. Water clouds and sunlight sparkles move in time and out of time. The past and present and future collapse into the timeless present.

I am not interested in photographs that show “that has been.” They only  show the banality of the passage of time from the present to the past. The photographic doxa. I am not interested in photographs of a person who was living but who is now dead. Why should I look at an object image that represents a monument, a trace, a shroud, a ghost, a death mask, an index, a faded memory, a reduction of a living three-dimensional energetic mind body into a flat, static death image? Why should I look at this reduction of a dynamic life to an object image encased in a cheap silver frame? Do I need these banalities and deceptions to support my memories? I have no need to remember the dead with photographs. Of what use are they to me?

Outside my window a bird is in flight, a helicopter passes across the horizon, the buildings cast shadows from the arc of the sun. With my camera, I stop the movement of the bird, the helicopter, the shadows, the sun. I stop the movement of the world and the flow of time. My camera transforms the dynamic movement of the stuff of the world into a static, flat photograph, an object made of ink and paper. This photograph is a record of a past world; a sample from the endless flow of time.

When Is The Photograph for Aristotle?

Aristotle’s examined the meaning of time in his masterwork Physics. He posited three puzzles or thought experiments.

The first puzzle observes that time seems to consists of the future (which is not yet) and the past (which is no longer). This suggests that no part of time is “now”. Time is made up wholly of things that either were or will be. But how can something exist if no part of it exists?  Considering  whether the past and future exist,  Aristotle said:

One part of it has been and is not, another part of it will be and is not yet. From these are composed both the infinite and whatever time is on any given occasion taken. But what is composed of non-beings might seem to be incapable of participating in being.

Ursula Cope, Time for Aristotle

To answer the first puzzle you might say there is a part of time that indeed exists which is the present or  the “now”. However, Aristotle anticipates this objection in the second puzzle and asserts that the “now” is not a part of time either.

When divisible things exist, one or more of their parts must also exist. But no part of time exists: some parts of time have been (i.e., the past ) and some parts are yet to be (i.e., the future). The now is not a part of time; it does not exist. Time is not composed of nows.

In the case of anything divisible, if it is, it is necessary that when it is, either all or some of its parts must exist. But of time, though it is divisible, some parts have been, some parts are to come, but no part is. The now is not a part. For the part measures and it is necessary that the whole is composed from the parts. But time is not thought to be composed out of nows.

Aristotle, Physics (Book IV, part 10-13)

Aristotle’s third puzzle concerns the nature of the “now” itself.  Aristotle reasons that the now is always the same and is always different.

How might Aristotle answer these puzzles about the sameness and difference of the now? He does have more to say about the now later in his account. As we shall see, he claims that the now is in a way always the same, but also in a way always different. But these later remarks do not, I think, provide us with a satisfying solution. The claim that the now remains always the same while being always different simply gives rise to a new puzzle.

Ursula Cope, Time for Aristotle

Aristotle reasoned that the future does not exist because it has not yet happened, the past does not exist because it has already happened and it is receding, and the present does not exist because it is a part of the past and the future, neither of which exist.

Aristotles puzzles suggest that there is no such thing as time or that time has a shadowy kind of existence: it is “barely and scarcely”.  This is not an illuminating answer to the puzzles. Aristotle gives us an account of time but he never tells us explicitly what the answers to the puzzles is. It may be there is no solution to the puzzles if a mind such as Aristotle’s cannot resolve them.

Saint Augustine reached the similar conclusion that time does not exist:

Of these three divisions of time (past, present, and future) then, how can two, the past and the future, be, when the past no longer is and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time but eternity. If, therefore, the present is time only because it moves on to become the past, how can we say that even the present is, when the reason why it is, is that it is not to be?

Saint Augustine, Confessions

A camera cannot photograph the past or the future because they do not exist. It can only photograph the now. However, Aristotle says the now does not exist either.

The fourth puzzle: how can the camera capture time when none of the three divisions of time seems to exist? If the camera is not capturing time, then what is it capturing?

It is often thought that time is the measure of movement or change. Without change there is no time and without time there is no change. The camera captures a duration of time by the duration of its shutter speed. A one second exposure is a longer duration than a 1/250 second exposure. Within that duration is movement and change. Can this be how the camera captures time?

Aristotle argued against the notion that time is change for two reasons. The first reason is that a movement or change exists only in the thing that is changing, whereas time seems to exist equally everywhere and in everything. The second is that change may be either faster or slower depending upon the change in the thing we are using to measure change, whereas time is constant; it does not move faster or slower. Time is the same everywhere. In Aristotle’s words:

Change is faster and slower. But time is not. For the slow and the fast are defined by time, fast being the thing moving much in little time, slow being the thing moving little in much. But time is not defined by time, not by its being so much nor by its being of such a sort. It is clear, then, that time is not change.

Ursula Cope, Time for Aristotle

The camera seems to be measuring and capturing time but time does not exist.  The camera does not capture any quality of time: not the past, not the present, not the future. The camera does not measure movement or change; rather, it freezes movement and change. If the camera is neither capturing time nor movement, then what is it capturing?

The fourth puzzle remains. If the past, future and present do not exist, then what is the camera capturing?  It may stop the clock but it does not stop time.

When is the Photograph For Bergson?

It is into pure duration that we plunge back, a duration in which the past, always moving on, is swelling unceasingly with a present that is absolutely new. We must by strong recoil of our personality on itself, gather up our past which is slipping away, in order to thrust it, compact and undivided, into a present which it will create by entering.

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

Bergson’s groundbreaking works explored the complex mechanism of memory and imagery. For Bergson, there is no separating the photograph from memory. The camera is a device that makes photographs which are a catalyst for memory.

Through our sense of sight our consciousness creates mental images. After we perceive these images, they recede into our past and we preserve them as memories in the form of  virtual images. When we remember an experience, it most strongly appears in our consciousness as an image.

Cameras, on the other hand, make photographs of referents. Bergson called these optical images. When we look at a photograph, its optical image triggers virtual images in our minds. Virtual images may be weaker or stronger and they may contract and expand from the present to the past through the activity of our consciousness. This is why optical images may stimulate different layers and strengths of memories. There is always an oscillation between past and present, the virtual and the optical. The “present” optical image and the past virtual image, blend and flow and create new virtual images.

The optical image and virtual images form a circuit in our consciousness which operates like a feedback loop of an electrical circuit. There is a continuous stream of virtual images (memories) and optical images (photographs) that flow around the circuit. Optical and virtual images may blend and flow, recede and advance, and mix and remix into new images. Through the energy of the circuit, the optical image passes through ever-expanding levels of memory as virtual images. The circuit may expand and contract as the memories move farther away or closer to the time when the actual optical image was made. The circuit dynamically generates new images that are composites of virtual and optical images. This may strengthen our perception of the image and our emotional responses.

When Is the Photograph for Einstein?

Both Aristotle and Newton believed in absolute time. That is, they believed that one could unambiguously measure the interval of time between two events, and that this time would be the same whoever measured it, provided they used a good clock. Time was completely separate from and independent of space. This is what most people would take to be the commonsense view. However, we have had to change our ideas about space and time.

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

Newton’s greatest achievement was his laws of absolute motion. These laws describe the measurement of motion in terms of absolute space and time. Absolute motion is motion through absolute space; the rate of motion is measured by absolute time.  Thus, every object has an absolute state of motion relative to absolute space. The notion of absolute time is intuitive to us; it describes our everyday experience. This means that each event can be labeled by a number called “time”, and all clocks would agree on the time interval between two events. Imagine that we have two timekeepers in a 100 meter dash held in a stadium. They start their watches when the gun goes off and stop the watches when the first runner crosses the finish line. The timekeepers will record the same time. This is our traditional understanding of photography.  Imagine that we take a photograph of the runner in the stadium. The photograph captures a fixed duration which is measured by the shutter speed of the camera. The photograph shows the runner in mid-stride: we have stopped motion and we have stopped time. The camera treats time, space and motion as absolutes, just as Newton said. Eadweard Muybridge’s series of a running man is an excellent example of this idea.

The camera records an image that is made with time and light. It says something about the “present” when it was taken. Barthes says that the image provides evidence that the referent (the thing that was photographed) actually exists. This view has many weaknesses as we will see.

Because the arrow of time points from the past, to the present and to the  future, the referent, the thing photographed, always reflects the ever receding past. It is left behind as time marches on into the future. Because the past is irrevocably intertwined with loss (all things decay, disintegrate or die in time), photography records death. For Barthes, the photographs of his mother were a catalyst for memory, loss and mourning.

Newton’s theories defined our understanding of motion and time until the late nineteenth century, when they began to be questioned by physicists. The threshold problem was how to explain the phenomena that light always travels at the same velocity regardless of the velocity of the source of the light.

This led to Albert Einstein’s revolutionary theories of special and general relativity.

Einstein discovered that the speed of light appears the same to every observer (no matter how fast the observer is moving) and that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. This is the theory of special relativity. For this to be true, space and time cannot be independent. Rather, they are “converted” into each other in such a way as to keep the speed of light constant for all observers. Space and time are relative (i.e., they depend on the motion of the observer who measures them) but light remains constant.

This led to the corollary that there is no absolute time. Instead, each observer has his own measure of time that can be recorded by a clock that he carries.  Clocks carried by different observers may not necessarily agree. Thus time becomes relative to the observer who measures it. If different observers are measuring the time of our runner on the track, the clocks would record different times depending upon the location and velocity of the observers. Time is no longer absolute.

There was a young lady named Bright

Whose speed was far faster than light;

She set out one day
In a relative way,
And returned on the previous night.

Limerick by A. H. Reginald Buller

The problem of gravity remained for Einstein. If you were to shake the sun like a cosmic rattle, gravity would move the earth instantly due to the gravitational force. Under the theory of special relativity, we would expect there to be an eight minute delay in the movement of the earth; this is the time it takes for light to travel from the sun to the earth. However, the speed of gravity is not only faster than the speed of light, it seems to move instantly. How does the sun move the earth instantly over 93 million miles?

To solve this problem, Einstein developed the general theory of relativity. Gravity (which is created by large bodies with high mass) curves space and slows time. When clocks are placed next to bodies with high mass, they slow down. This led Einstein to spacetime.  Space and time in Einstein’s universe are no longer flat (as assumed by Newton) but are pushed and pulled, stretched and warped by mass. Gravity is strongest where spacetime is the most curved, and it weakens where spacetime is flat. This is the essence of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which is often summed up as follows: “matter tells spacetime how to curve, and curved spacetime tells matter how to move”.

Einstein’s theories of relativity are not intuitive. We live and think in terms of Newtonian physics. We are hardwired to see the world  in three absolute dimensions. Space is absolute; it does not bend or warp. Time is absolute: it is measured by the pulse of the clock. We move in the world at non-relativistic (very slow) speeds and the effects of relativity only occur at high speeds; it is natural that we do not think in terms of relativity. This works well enough if we are primitive hunters looking to kill a deer with a spear but this common sense view of the world fails when we consider the physics of the very fast, the very large, or the very small.  These effects matter for such things as astronauts in spaceships going to the moon or the calculations needed to measure precise locations using global positioning satellites. This is where or common sense view of the world must yield to the truth of hard science.

If there is no privileged vantage point from which to determine the ‘truth’ of the matter-and the whole point of relativity is that there is not-then temporal properties like past, present, and future cannot possibly be aspects of reality as it is in itself. They must be subjective and perspectival in nature. As strange as it sounds, if relativity is right, then the dynamic theory of time must be wrong. All events, past, present, and future, are present from some frame of reference. Without a real past, present, and future, there can be no passage of time and no dynamic change.

Adrian Bardon, A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time

Einstein’s discoveries of general and special relativity open a new paradigm with which we can expand our understanding of photography and its potential. We are no longer bound to make images that capture a view of the world based upon 19th century science.

Can we use the theories of relativity to inspire a paradigm shift for photography? Can we break the old assumptions that limit our understanding of what photographs may capture? Can we create new photographs based upon relativity rather than the old Newtonian mechanics? Can we free photography from its historical function of recording the past?

We know that photography is about light and time. Without light there can be no photograph and without time the aperture cannot control the amount of light that passes through the lens to the film or sensor.  Without controlling time we cannot control the image; too much time and the image is all white, too little time and the image is all black. We know that the velocity of light is a constant. It is spacetime that dilates and contracts. Therefore, the variable that we can work with to re-imagine photography is time. Times slows with velocity. Would it be possible to accelerate a camera to such a velocity that it could contract relative time and capture a present moment? Can we invent a new camera that records Einsteinian rather than Newtonian time? Can we imagine new image making devices that use the discoveries of modern physics?

The Event Horizon Telescope is an array of eight ground-based radio telescopes that was designed to capture images of a black hole. Know that a black hole has a mass so great that nothing, not even light, can escape it. This telescope is powerful enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk café in Paris. In 2019 it made the first image of a black hole in the galaxy Messier 87. The press release by the Breakthrough Committee announcing the achievement said:

Using eight sensitive radio telescopes strategically positioned around the world in Antarctica, Chile, Mexico, Hawaii, Arizona and Spain, a global collaboration of scientists at 60 institutions operating in 20 countries and regions captured an image of a black hole for the first time. By synchronizing each telescope using a network of atomic clocks, the team created a virtual telescope as large as the Earth, with a resolving power never before achieved from the surface of our planet. One of their first targets was the supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy – its mass equivalent to 6.5 billion suns. After painstakingly analyzing the data with novel algorithms and techniques, the team produced an image of this galactic monster, silhouetted against hot gas swirling around the black hole, that matched expectations from Einstein’s theory of gravity: a bright ring marking the point where light orbits the black hole, surrounding a dark region where light cannot escape the black hole’s gravitational pull.

The director of the project said that they set out “to see the unseeable”. To do that they needed to build a virtual telescope as large as the earth to see it.

The photograph created by the largest and most complex camera in the history of mankind captured an image of absolute darkness (the complete absence of light which can never escape a black hole) and a ring of light around the Messier 87 galaxy as it existed 57 million light years ago. It sounds like science fiction but that is precisely the point.

Can we photograph the future?

Can we photograph the present?

Can we use multiple cameras, some in motion, some at rest?

Can we invent a new camera system that records spacetime?

Can we create a four dimensional photograph: the three dimensions of space and time?

Can we photograph a relativistic world rather than an absolute one?

Can we break the arrow of time and photograph it?

Can we photograph virtual worlds that are not bound by Newtonian physics?

When Is the Photograph According to Science? Intervals of Planck Time; Duration; Why We Can Never Photograph the Present

Each event is the smallest time, smaller than the minimum of continuous thinkable time, because it is divided into proximate past and immanent future.

Giles Deleuze

Duration is an interval of time with a beginning and an end. However, we cannot precisely measure the beginning and the endpoints of a duration. As we try to pinpoint the precise time of each endpoint, the precision of the measurement of the endpoints becomes more fuzzy. It is easy to imagine a duration of a year; we can measure its beginning and endpoints. What about very short durations? Can a duration be so short that we cannot measure the endpoints?  It would have no duration, collapse into itself and become the present.

The shortest durations that we can produce are pulses of laser light. These pulses occur on inconceivably short time scales measured in attoseconds (10-18 second). We do not have instruments precise enough to measure durations this short. There are theoretical limits on our ability to measure intervals because space, time and energy become intertwined at very small intervals and distances. The theoretical limit of an interval that has any meaning is 10(-43) second and is called Planck time. In one unit of Planck time, light travels the Planck distance. This distance is 10(-35) meters or about 1020 times smaller than the size of the nucleus of an atom. The Planck distance is the scale at which classical ideas of gravity and spacetime cease to be valid, and quantum effects dominate.

But even Planck time has duration. It has a beginning and an end even though its duration is so short that it is beyond our ability to conceive. Is it possible for a duration to be so short that time ceases to exist and the duration collapses into the present? We may never know because this duration would collapse into a singularity and is then beyond the limit of the event horizon of our technology to obtain information from the event.

Since there is a technical limit on our ability to measure duration, is there a limit on the shortest duration that we can imagine?  Deleuze said that the duration of an event may be shorter than the minimum of continuous thinkable time. However, durations this short collapse into singularity.

A singularity is a one-dimensional point that contains infinite mass in an infinitely small space, where density and gravity become infinite, and the laws of physics cease to operate. The physicist Kip Thorne famously described the singularity as: “the point where all laws of physics break down.” It is not knowable by our technology or our imaginations.

The absolute present is a singularity. It cannot be tested by our scientific instruments; it cannot be measured even with atomic clocks; we cannot conceive it with our imaginations.

Aristotle and Saint Augustine were correct. The present does not exist. We never perceive any event in the “present.”  The event is a duration with endpoints that we cannot measure. A camera can never take a photograph of the referent as it exists in the present. It always photographs the referent in the past. We cannot imagine building a camera that could take an image with a shutter speed of Planck time but, even if it could, Planck time still has duration (even though it is inconceivably short); the image taken by a Planck camera would still not capture the present. Furthermore, the  camera records light that is reflected from an object that lags the present by the speed of light and the distance between the object and the camera. The camera only records the past.

In addition there is a biological reason why we cannot perceive anything in the “present.” This is due to the speed of light which is 186,000 miles per second. The time it takes for light to travel from the object to our eyes creates a lag between the object and our perception of the object. We always see the object in the past. When we perceive an object with our senses there is another delay in our awareness of the object because of the time it takes nerve impulses to travel within our bodies. The impulse time of our nervous system is slow and creates another  lag between the perception of an object and our awareness of the object in our consciousness.

All exposures have duration. Duration is measured by the camera’s shutter speed. Assume that I take a two-second exposure: -1 second (when the shutter is opened) marks the past, 0 marks the nominal “present,” (relative to the future closing of the shutter in one-second), and +1 second marks the future (relative to the opening of the shutter two-seconds earlier).  Past, present and future are marked by the shutter. The shutter speed is irrelevant, even with very short speeds to capture events in Planck time or very long shutter speeds to capture events in years, the shutter still marks past, “present” and future.

After the shutter closes, the image of the referent captured by the camera begins its slippage from the “present”. Of course the image was already in the past due to the lag caused by the period of time it takes for light to bounce off the referent and hit the sensor or film of the camera. The camera has taken an image of the referent as it existed in the past, continuously slipping into the more remote past, taken at a time that does not exist in the first place; the present. This breaks down into a photographic singularity.

The paradox is that the camera is measuring and capturing a duration of time. It does not capture the present because no duration has a present: the present does not exist. The shutter measures duration with imprecise endpoints and with no midpoint. The camera never captures the present moment. Each event that we imagine with a duration can always be divided again and again. We never reach the midpoint of the duration. When the shutter of a camera opens and closes, what is it capturing? Are we stuck in the banality that the camera is only capturing the past, like the fly frozen in amber?

We know that neither the past nor the future exist and have seen that the present does not exist either. So it must follow that the camera is capturing time that does not exist. If there is no past, present and future as Aristotle and St. Augustine suggest, then when is a photograph?

Bergson wrote that duration is not one present instant replacing another. If that were true then there would never be anything but the present. Bergson, in Creative Evolution defined duration as: “Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.” And it is our memory that preserves the past and as we age our memories grow longer and longer.

Bergson pushes the past into the present. We live in the past but we filter the past from entering our present only when there is some utility in doing so. Bergson writes:

In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. The cerebral mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit beyond the threshold only that which can cast light on the present situation or further the action now being prepared-in short, only that which can give useful work.

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

We live in the past even though it no longer exists. The past looms over our present through our memories, as imperfect as they inevitably are.  We feel the past loom over everything that we think, feel and do.

Circuits-Optical and Virtual Images; Photographs and Memory

Subjectivity is never ours, it is time, that is, the soul or spirit, the virtual.

Giles Deleuze,  Cinema 2

When we capture a photograph, we make an actual optical image. The instant the optical image is made, it immediately recedes into the past. When we view the optical image, it triggers our memories. We remember when and where we made the image and our sensory impressions and feelings when we took it. Memories act as a catalyst which stimulates other memories. We access our memories through mental images. These second order memory-images are called virtual images.

The actual optical image taken by the camera and the virtual images created by the observer of the optical image form circuits. Circuits are loops of actual and virtual images. A continuous stream of images and memories flow around the loop. The loop may expand and contract as the memories of the object move farther away or closer in time to when the actual optical image was taken. Through the activity of the circuit, the image passes through ever-expanding levels of memory and perception that deepen our knowledge of the image and our emotional response. The mental images made by the circuits may reflect deeper and deeper layers of reality, memory and fantasy.

The circuit may expand and deepen to embrace subconscious memories. These memories may become faded, distorted or even turned into fantasies. They may be mixed into loops of virtual images. Through this process images made by the circuits become further and further removed from the original optical image.

The output of the circuit changes over time. As our memories change, the circuits that arise from viewing an optical image also change. If we look at a photograph today, next year and in five years, the memory input into the circuit will have changed,  the virtual images will be new and the images that are output by the circuit will have changed. But the optical image which is the original catalyst for the circuit will not have changed.

The circuit operates like an electronic feedback loop. The output of the circuit is fed back into the input of the circuit. Amplitude grows, creativity flows. The input is memory and the output is imagery. The amplitude of the circuit varies with the strength of the memories that the optical image stimulates. Normally, the amplitude will be the highest when the image is seen by the photographer who made it. However, this is not to say that, when we view a photograph we did not take, it will not stimulate memories and circuits. They  will, of course, be different than those experienced by the photographer.

The circuit is a complex adaptive system of memory. The circuit is complex because it is a dynamic network of interactions between different layers of memory and images within our subconscious. Rather than being static aggregations of individual memories or images, the circuit is adaptive in that the optical and virtual images mutate, transform, evolve and re-mix.

I look at my photograph of a boat floating in a canal next to the Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam.  I see the oily black water in the bottom of the boat, yellow leaves floating in the water, a rope, and the reflections of trees, houses and clouds.

The boat is submerged in black and oily water, the wood decaying and the paint faded, a frayed rope leads out of the frame to the shore, and trees from the other side of the canal are reflected in the water. It is a quiet image, a simple and peaceful image, it is still, without movement. This is the actual optical image.

I remember when I took this photograph. I remember the place, the time and the quality of the light. I remember my emotions. I walked along the canal, the grassy banks, the wispy foggy mist rising from the water, my old black, heavy bicycle. The wheel faint ticking when I laid the bicycle down in the grass, my shoes wet from the dew, the ducks rustling and honking, a bicycle bell in the distance. I remember the still water in the canal and the rows of red brick houses with white trim reflected down the length of the canal, the reflections of the bridges making circles in the water. I remember reading Joyce in the cafes.

All these moving scenes are still there for us today rendered more beautiful still by the waters of sorrow which have passed over them and by the rich incrustations of time.

James  Joyce, Ulysses, at  p 431

Years after I took that photograph, I walk along the same canal by the Olympic Stadium. I fall into reverie: memories, daydreams and fragmented images. I do not know their source: they appear on my mental screen as if made by an unseen projector.  The images begin remixing and creating new images and memories.  Fragmented, evanescent images of water, canals, and boats. Synaptic networks, images and memories, electronic feedback circuits. Input to output to input, image to memory to image. Image making loops accessing different layers of my consciousness and memory. Reverie and dream. Rich incrustations of time.

Today, when I look at the photograph in the “present” it stimulates memories but they are slipping further and further into the past, day by day, hour by hour, second by second. Over time, my memories will grow faint, uncertain and become mixed with fantasies, other memories and fragments of images. I cannot separate the photograph from the memory. They have become one.

The Photograph As a Dynamic, Generative System; Intersum

What I see has been here, in this place which extends between infinity and the subject (operator or spectator); it has been here, and yet immediately separated; refutably present, and yet already deferred. It is all this which the verb intersum means.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

The photograph is a dynamic generative system. It is a creative process powered by images, memory and consciousness. It provides the input into a system (optical images) that outputs new images (virtual images) which in turn provide the input (new images) for the next feedback loop. The system operates in non-linear time. The system may expand and contract with movements of consciousness. It may move back into memory or forward into the future. It may spin on a point in the present or oscillate into the past or the future. These multi-dimensional movements produce new images as the system expands, contracts and spins. Circuits are a remix of image and memory. There is a continuous flow of images and memories through these loops.

Circuits are a generative image making process. Photography is the electricity that powers the circuits. Circuits provide us with a subtle and sophisticated analysis of the meaning of a photograph. Circuits consider how the photograph interacts with the mechanisms of the observer’s mind; it is a trigger for perception, memory, fantasy, consciousness and time. Circuits liberate photography from the banal view that the print is a static image of a frozen slice of time. The photograph is no longer a memento mori.  It is no longer a static, isolated and dead thing, a mere slice of the past, a banality. The photograph is the switch that turns on the circuits which power our consciousness to create new images, flowing, oscillating, re-combining, modulating images, all emanating and flowing from the original photograph.

General Thoughts on Temporal Density

In New York I attend the opening of the new Joel Meyerowitz show: Morandi, Cezanne and Me.  Meyerowitz was given permission to photograph the studios of Morandi and Cezanne. In Cézanne’s studio,  Meyerowitz was struck by its old, grey walls and how Cézanne’s vases, pitchers and skulls were absorbed into the background. He photographed just about every object in the studio: vases, pitchers, skulls and Cézanne’s hat. This project inspired him to visit Morandi’s studio where he photographed many famous objects that Morandi had painted over 60 years (old, dusty vases, funnels, watering cans and shells) against the original wallpaper on the walls of the studio which was torn, paint-splotched and faded.

The photographs from these projects are loaded with temporal density. The objects were shot in the original studios of two dead artists (Cezanne 1906, Morandi 1964) and their studios are slowly decaying. Even though the objects are static-there is no suggestion of movement or change-they express duration. Their duration is long: they change slowly. By placing the objects in front of the walls of these old studios, they become rooted in the past; we can see the effects of time as the paper has yellowed, become brittle and decayed. The objects emphasize the death of the artists-you cannot separate the objects from the artists or their death. Even though the photographs were taken in the present, they are grounded in the past. The objects are still, immobile, silent against the studio walls. There is time even in stillness. We feel a tension between the illusory permanence of the objects and the impermanence of the wall paper. We can imagine that, in the future, the wall paper will disintegrate completely and fall into dust on the floor, and the objects will rust, decay and collapse. Note that the durations of the objects and the wallpaper are different: the wallpaper will disintegrate long before the objects.

These photographs contain temporal density. They show us different dimensions of time within a single image. They represent time in complex and ambiguous ways. They show us the past, present and future in new ways. They dance with duration.

Photographs with temporal density disrupt the flight path of the arrow of time. They may break the arrow, bend it into a circle or transform the line of the shaft into a point of singularity.

Photographs with temporal density are concerned with the shift from Newton to Einstein in our understanding of time. Our conception of time has become more sophisticated due to advances in physics and cosmology. We no longer view time as a linear progression of a clock which measures absolute time moment by moment. Now we understand that time is relative. It slows as velocity and mass increase. We know that the speed of light is constant but it is space-time that expands and contracts.

Photographs with temporal density can show non-linear time, narrative development, systemic thinking, and generative processes. They can stimulate exploration of the great existential questions and the Form of photography: death, time and memory.

Even though present, past and future are embedded in almost all photographs, they may still be temporally thin. Consider the Lewis Payne photograph in Camera Lucida. It is an image of Lewis Payne sitting on a stool in handcuffs before he was to be hanged two weeks later. He was alive when the photograph was taken but he would be dead two weeks later. The photograph anticipated his future death. From our present, of course, the photograph and the hanging both happened in the past and Lewis Payne is dead.

The photograph of Lewis Payne is temporally thin because it does not show us anything other than what any photograph of a dead person shows. We can look at a photograph of any person who has died and see the same three time periods as we see in the photograph of Lewis  Payne. They were alive when the photograph was taken, they are now dead, and we are looking at them in the future relative to the time when the photograph was taken. All photographs of people anticipate the event of their future death. They suggest the present, the past and the future depending upon the perspective from which they are being viewed.

This is the banality of Barthes’ analysis of the Lewis Payne photograph in Camera Lucida.

Long Duration Images

Hiroshi Sugimoto takes long exposures of movies as they run in historical movie theaters. The details of the interior of the theaters are resolved but the movie screen is white light. The exposures do not capture any of the scenes from the movies but they show the movement of time by reducing the scenes to over-exposed white light. They create a tension between the static movie theater that is recorded with resolution and detail, and the images projected on the screen that are recorded as white light.

These photographs show two time scales: the interior of the theater as it is in the present and the film as it projects moving images at 24 frames per second. The theater is static; the movie is dynamic. The movement of time for the theater is very slow; the movement of time for the movies is very fast. Time is measured by the passage of the frames of the movie. In the photographs, time is rendered as pure white light. The movie may have showed the present, past and future in complex ways but all we see in the photograph is white light. No information about the movie escapes the white light; it is a photographic singularity. These images are temporally dense because they show many complex time periods and operations of time within a single image.

Serial Images

Hitoshi Nomura investigated the passage of time, the fundamentals of matter, and the rhythms of the universe through his photography. In the late 1960s, he created three-dimensional sculptural works and photographed them in intervals to document their decomposition over time. Nomura selected materials that would quickly disintegrate so that he could use a camera to record their changes in a short period of time.

One such project was “Tardiology”.  Nomura built a twenty-eight-foot-tall stack of cardboard boxes in the front courtyard of the Kyoto Municipal Museum. He photographed the decay of the boxes over intervals as they collapsed under their own weight due to sun, wind and rain. The form of the boxes as well as the space that they occupied changed over time. “Tardiology” presented an artistic problem that Nomura explored throughout his career: how to create art that can represent the characteristics of image, time and space.

The use of photography to capture and display moments in time gave way to the use of photography to generate series of images whose visual relationships to each other convey temporal experience. For Nomura the photographer and artist, the camera is not merely an apparatus that marks the passage of time but also a tool for exploring the interrelatedness of image, time, and space that underpins temporal experience.

Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol, Hitoshi Nomura: Seriality and Photographic Time

In “Dryice” Nomura weighed and  placed blocks of dry ice on mats. As the dry ice evaporated, he weighed the ice, recorded the weight, time and date on the mats in white letters, and then moved the ice down the mats and photographed the new set-up.  Nomura took a series of photographs of the dry ice as it succumbed to the elements, melting and evaporating over time.

In “Time Arrow: Oxygen-183 Degrees” Nomura placed liquid oxygen in glass cylinders with open tops that allowed their contents to evaporate and create ice on the glass walls.  In “Iodine” he documented the disappearance of a substance that, like dry ice, changes directly from a solid to a gas. Nomura created other serial images that showed the passage of time in a day’s walk, the cycles of the moon, and the path of the sun. Nomura’s images are temporally dense because they record movement, change and phase transitions of the natural world over long periods of time

Araki’s Date Stamps and Future Images

The first cameras with a date function were introduced to the public. Such a camera allowed you to date all your photographs. It could be manipulated so easily. I took photographs, one after another, with different dates since I could switch the past with the future by manipulating the dates on an automatic camera.

Nobuyoshi Araki

Araki stamps his photographs with dates in the future.  Are these photographs true or false?  If there was nothing in the photograph to suggest when it was taken, then how would we know if the photograph was made in the future or not? We assume it is not possible to take a photograph in the future but how do we know this is true? How would we know if the photograph was not taken by beings in the future, transported with a time machine or through a worm hole back to our present and left for Araki to discover?  We assume it is a trick or a game or a thought experiment but how do we know as a matter of provable fact that the photograph was not received from the future? How do we know if Araki is telling the truth or lying? Araki wrote:

Photographs are diary entries.That’s all they can be. Photographs are just documentations of a day’s event. At the same time, they drag the past into the present and also continue into the future. A day’s occurrence evokes both the past and the future. That’s why I want to clearly date my pictures. It’s actually frustrating, that’s why I now photograph the future.

Nobuyoshi Araki

Is the future fluid? What is the future?  The future is a tree of possibilities endlessly branching away from the present. All futures are imaginary. The future is an imaginary space that expresses itself in the present. The future is only limited by our imagination and the laws of physics.  Artists and scientists create the future in books, movies, games, art, architecture and virtual worlds.

We do not move in one direction, rather do we wander back and forth, turning now this way and now that. We go back on our own tracks . . .’ That thought of Montaigne’s reminds me about something I thought of in connection with flying saucers, humanoids, and the remains of unbelievably advanced technology found in some ancient ruins. They write about aliens, but I think that in these phenomena we are in fact confronting ourselves; that is our future, our descendants who are actually traveling in time.

Andrei Tarkovsky

In Chris Marker’s Le Jetee, a man travels to the future through the portals of his consciousness and brings his memories of the future back to the present. The man remembers strange beings, shadows, mysteries, cryptic words, hostility and fear. Who can say that travel to the future is not possible in the way Marker envisioned it?

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.

The Garden of Forking Paths, Borges

Is it possible to take a photograph of the future?  Can we travel to the future in a time machine or through a worm hole? Does the future lie in a parallel universe next to ours in which we can enter if we can only find the key? Are there an infinite number of parallel universes containing all future possibilities? Can we photograph what we see when we use psychedelics to open the doors of perception into the future? We have seen filmmakers and painters create images of psychedelic worlds but what about photographers?

Imagine that we have invented a time machine. We travel in the time machine to 2150, capture a photograph of New York and bring it back to our present in 2020. How would we authenticate the image?  Who would believe us?  We could show the differences in the cityscape between future and present but how could we prove that the photograph was not a fraud created by a digital artist?

Photographs of Zircon Crystals-The Oldest Thing on Earth

The oldest object on Earth is the zircon crystal. It is 4.4 billion years old. The zircon crystal exists on a different time scale than human beings. It changes so slowly that, from our perspective, it does not change at all. Its future is the same as its present. Its present is the same as its past.

If I take a photograph of a zircon crystal, when was the photograph taken? Is there a difference between a photograph of the crystal taken in the past, present or future? Does the arrow of time exist for something that is over four billion years old?  Relative to our time scale, the arrow of time does not move. Relative to the time scale of the universe which is 13.8 billion years old, yes indeed, it moves.

Imagine that I take a photograph of a zircon crystal today. I time stamp the photograph June 26, 2017.  I make a digital copy of the image and time stamp it June 26, 2117. I compare the photographs. They are identical.  Could you tell which one was taken on June 26, 2017 and which one was taken on June 26, 2117? In 100 years, the crystal will not have changed.  If the future is identical to the present, does the future exist at all? Does the present exist at all?

If the crystal does not change, it exists outside of time. Photographs of the crystal at its formation, at two billion years old and at five billion years old would all be the same.  All time, past and future, has collapsed to the present relative to the zircon crystal.  Is my photograph of the crystal stamped June 26, 2117 a photograph of the future?  Have I played Araki’s game or have I illuminated something?

It’s always like that. You never understand anything. Yes, it’s always like that. You never understand anything. And one night, you end it in death.

Godard, Alphaville, Alpha 60

Shiva dances universes into creation, sustains them and destroys them in endless cycles of  vast expanses of time and in inconceivably  brief instants of time. Future, present and past collapse into the eternal Now. Duration dies. All of this in a blink of Shiva’s eye.

Timeless Images-Seascapes

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes are soft horizontal bands of grey, black and white. They are made of air, cloud and sea. We do not know where they were taken or when they were taken.  They exist outside of time and place.  They do not represent people, places or things; we cannot identify where or when they were taken. They exist outside of time and memory. These images are timeless; their duration and temporal density is almost infinite.

Krishnamurti on Thought and Time

Thought is dependent upon time. Thought exists within time. Thought limits our understanding of time.  We cannot understand time without considering how we think about time.

We live within our memories.  Memories form our personalities, govern our responses to our sense impressions and enable us to survive in a complex and dangerous world. Memories give us comfort that we have lived and help us keep our relationships alive long after they are gone. Memories are the operating systems of our lives.

When we observe the movement of our thoughts closely, we see the separation between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. Thought never resides in the present; it is always fluctuating between the past and future, spinning its anxieties and fantasies. It is like a butterfly flitting about the flowers. It is only with great effort that we can concentrate and focus thought; it is even more difficult to silence thought and reside in the present.

When we try to think about the present, we find that it cannot be grasped. The present is a state outside of our thought. It is like describing the color blue to someone who has been blind their entire life.

Our instrument of exploration, our consciousness (the egoic “I”), is made of thought which is bound to time and is created by time. The “I” can never experience the present because the present is a timeless state. It is like trying to capture water flowing in a stream with a butterfly net.

J. Krishnamurti explains:

That “I”, that entity which is a thought-process—can it ever be new? If it cannot, then there must be an ending to thought.  Is not anything that continues inherently destructive? That which has continuity can never renew itself. As long as thought continues through memory, through desire, through experience, it can never renew itself; therefore, that which is continued cannot know the real. You may be reborn a thousand times, but you can never know the real for only that which dies, that which comes to an end, can renew itself.

J.  Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

The only way to still thought is through meditative practices; in meditation the movement of the “I” is stilled.  I release my grasping of the past through memory and searching for the future through fantasy. “I” enter the timeless state in which the movement of  “I” is stilled.  I experience the present. I am aware of the present as it arises moment to moment. There is no separation between my awareness and the flow of the universe; I am the sea and the sounds, the sun and the waves, the canals and the boats. In the timeless state, my consciousness is beyond ego, mind, memory and the movement of thought. There is no life or death in this state. I have entered the now and I witness the eternal.

We are left with a paradox that strikes at the heart of photography. Scientists and philosophers tell us that the present does not exist. We live our daily lives in either the past or the future; we exist in duality, living in time, separated from the timeless universe.

The wisdom traditions tell us that the goal of spiritual practice is to attain present moment awareness. We experience the present only when we have managed to still our minds through intense and dedicated spiritual practice. The present is a rare and subtle state of consciousness that is very difficult to attain and, if we do, it is fleeting.

In photography we persist in the illusion that we are capturing and preserving an event that occurred in the present. The truth is that we have never captured an event that occurred in the present; we only capture events that  manifested in the past, and continuously slip into the more distant past, because the present does not exist.  The present is only the slippage of the past to greater and greater temporal distances.

When did we take the photograph?  What is the image showing us? Is the answer to the question so simple: the photographs shows us the past? I wonder: “What are we really doing?”  I find myself in the same place as Barthes. I have worked hard to state the obvious and to find distinctions without a difference.  Perhaps this is the source of his many references to haiku: they point to the timeless, the eternal now, the inexpressible, to indescribable states of mind.

Time and photography collapse into a singularity.

How can I think about something by not thinking?  I must descend deeper into myself to find what I am looking for. I contemplate the Zen koan:

When the words and ideas

that describe reality fall away,

all that remains

is reality itself.

John Daido Loori, The True Dharma Eye, Zen Master Dogen’s Three Hundred Koans

When Is Photography? New Directions

Aristotle considered whether time really exists at all. Some of time is in the past and no longer exists and some of time is in the future and has not yet happened.  The “now” is an instant separating past and future; but the “now” does not exist either, for it does not refer to a period of time that is ever actually present. The present is always not yet or already gone. No matter how precisely we try to measure or perceive the present, it slips into the past or the future.

If there is no present moment, there is no duration. If there is no duration, exposure times are an illusion. We seek to divide that which cannot be divided. Further, the objects that we photograph are an illusion; they are quantum fields of energy that our senses assemble into objects that exist in the slippage of time. The objects have qualities that we cannot perceive because we are limited by our bodily senses. The world is ultimately a construction.  This is the beauty and the failure of photography. This is the genesis of the tension between truth and falsehood, past and present, light and dark, and death and life. This is the space where both the potential and limitations of photography live.

Time exists in the body, in the seasons, in the turning of the heavenly bodies. Time exists in the movement from life to death. Time exists in change. Time moves in one direction, from the present to the past, the river flows, and I can never step in the same river twice.

We photograph an object, the camera freezes the image into an image-object, it immediately resides in the past and then, in the ever distant past. Over time the object ages, decays, dies. We document the dying things of the world. We reduce the living to the dead. We are agents of death; we are death’s great illuminators. We are alchemists that use light and chemicals to make image-objects of death, time and memory. Our image-objects are catalysts that stimulate loss, mourning and suffering. We have transmuted light and chemicals into an infinity of images but have not found the philosopher’s stone. This is why Barthes could not resurrect his mother through the Winter Garden Photograph.

Photography must embrace a more complex view of time that will enrich our discourse and open it to creative, new directions. We must disassociate photography from death, time and memory; we must outplay the old paradigms. Photographers should no longer be agents of death. Photography should no longer be the target of the arrow of time. Time is multi-dimensional and fluid. Photography should capture life and the present, death and the past, and the futuristic imaginings of our visionaries, all to embrace the totality of our human experience.

Philosophy, science and art have made stunning advancements and photography must also evolve. Photography must move away from the Newtonian view of time that has dominated  and imprisoned it.  It must escape the banality of capturing the past and preserving memory, and embrace new theories such as Bergson’s memory cone, Einstein’s theories of relativity, Deleuze’s time as a manifold of processes, and Krishnamurti’s timeless state. These and other thinkers have given us a new and complex language that has the potential to revolutionize photography.

I look to painters for inspiration. I contemplate Mark Rothko’s black color field paintings in the Rothko Chapel and Agnes Martin’s white grid paintings in the Harwood Gallery. These paintings collapse and expand space. They stop time. They do not trigger memory. These are powerful and transcendent images that are not concerned with death, time and memory. When I sit before these paintings, I drop into a meditative state; they transport me into the eternal now.

We may look to our visionary photographers for inspiration. They have outplayed the paradigm of death, time and memory and have expanded the medium’s potential.  Hiroshi Sugimoto (Seascapes), Alfred Stieglitz (Equivalents), Minor White (The Sound of One Hand Clapping), Wolfgang Tillmans (Blushes, Mental Pictures, and Freischwimmer) and the Starn Twins (Ganjin, Absorption of Light) have explored questions of light, time, space and consciousness. These photographs are timeless: their temporal density is infinite.

If we contemplate these photographs, they still our minds and expand our awareness; they stimulate the meditative state and we may realize the bliss of merging with Spirit, the ground of all being.

Photography is the gate to mystery. Darkness within darkness, light within light.

C. THE THIRD FORM OF PHOTOGRAPHY: MEMORY

Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. Later on they do claim remembrance when they show their scars. The face he had seen was to be the only peacetime image to survive the war. Had he really seen it? Or had he invented that tender moment to prop up the madness to come?

Chris Marker, La Jetee

What Is  Memory?

Time and memory merge into each other; they are like the two sides of a medal. It is obvious enough that without time, memory cannot exist either. But memory is something so complex that no list of all its attributes could define the totality of the impressions through which it affects us. Memory is a spiritual concept!

Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Memory is the process of perceiving information from the world around us, processing it, storing it and recalling it. Henri Bergson suggests that all sensation is memory because even the present is the “past devouring the future”.  The strength and longevity of memories are determined by the power of the sensory experiences that generate them. Some experiences create powerful memories that never leave us, others create only temporary memories that we do not retain.

Memories are mental images that begin clear and highly resolved and then weaken and fade over time. Sometimes my strongest memories are in color and then they fade into black and white as they dissipate over time,  like a wisp of smoke. Memory may become distorted or corrupted by the ego through its function of protecting us  from psychological or physical harm. We may even invent fantasies and dreams to ease our sufferings and they may become our memories. We remember our fantasies and dreams, and they become true.

Memory  creates our personality, and supports our life but it is a weak, sad and futile substitute for life. It never replaces the beloved which  we have lost. We can never hold hands with a memory.  It never replaces time that we have lost. We can never re-live our youth. We are three dimensional beings living in a three dimensional world. Memory has no dimension so we can never grasp it. Memory is like our reflection in a mirror that we struggle to touch and hold. Time dissolves memory.

No matter how vivid the memory, the power of time was stronger. I knew this instinctively.

Haruki Murakami, The Wind Cave

The synapses in our brains that preserve memory weaken and fade over time and their connections break. Our photographs, which have become substitutes for our memories, grow old, become brittle, decompose, yellow, and disintegrate with age. Monuments break and crumble to the ground.

One photograph found after you died

of you at twenty

beautiful in a way

I would never see

for that was nine years

before I was born

but the picture has

faded suddenly

spots have marred it

maybe it is beyond repair

I have only what I remember.

W.S. Merwin

Photographs and memories can never resurrect the touch, the smile or the sound of her breath as she sleeps in the night while the sea restlessly flows and sighs around the rocks and the cliffs below. Even during this perfect moment, I know it will not last. I know that she will be lost and that I cannot ever experience this moment again. I breath her breath into my cells; I absorb her air into my body. We are one in lightness and space. I hold her tight. I struggle to imprint the experience so clearly and profoundly in my mind that I will have this memory forever. She breath, sea breath, salt tears, salt water.

No memory can recreate a scintilla of that  experience. Can memories make me happy if I accept that nothing will bring back the beloved, if I accept impermanence and let the beloved go? Or does  memory always stimulate loss and sadness, melancholia and  futility?

Memory According to Henri Bergson

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

Bergson said there are two kinds of memory. Habitual memories are everyday memories that we need to survive in the world. They are aligned with the sensory impressions that we receive from the body. They stimulate automatic movement and actions through repetition. They are motor mechanisms developed through an adaptation of the nervous system.

Pure memory is memory that is stored deep in my unconscious. It arises as a result of my personal experience and cannot be repeated.  Pure memory  may arise through sensations, objects or images. It is the basis of the association of ideas. It is a reservoir of memories that are in a virtual rather than an actual state as is the case with habitual memory. I remember the legal principles that I learned in the past and I can apply them in my law practice today. I remember the way to the grocery store, the office, the cafe and back to my apartment in New York. I remember my past experiences and my relationships.  I remember what I have read and learned.

My life is memory. Without memory I cannot function. I watch the movements of my thoughts. They flutter from memory to memory,  fantasy to fantasy, daydream to daydream and conflict to conflict. My monkey mind pulls me into the past and projects me into the future but it never centers in the present. Its purpose is to protect me from harm. It continuously imagines stories that may lead to psychological or physical danger and then searches for imaginary solutions to imaginary problems. My mind must remain in active control. It treats silence as a lack of control, as a threat to well-being. This is the source of the difficulty in meditation. No matter how silent my  mind may be, my  ego always reasserts itself, and the cacophony returns. This is the state of ordinary consciousness.

The prayer wheel  sitting on my desk reminds me of my last trip to Nepal. We climbed through the Mustang District near the Tibetan border to explore Buddhist caves that contained ancient murals and relics. I remember:

At the base of the broken stupa

the sun and the moon lie in the mud

an old woman walks around and around

kneeling and touching her forehead to the ground.

Om mane padme hum.

She shows me her prayer beads and

points to the monastery destroyed by the earthquake.

Her eyes are cloudy with cataracts.

What did I bring down from the summit of the mountain?

What blessings did I receive in the snow temple?

Clouds flow across mountain faces.

Light and dark bands move endlessly.

The summit is at the base of the mountain.

This is where I received my wisdom.

Present Moment Awareness Is Beyond Memory

Bergson said there is no consciousness without memory. But there is another  state of consciousness that Bergson did not consider.  It is the state which is beyond memory: present moment awareness, the timeless present where there is no perception of past or future, memory or fantasy.

In this state there is no thinking of the past or the future. Memory’s machinery does not turn. The voices of the mind are silent, consciousness has expanded beyond the limits of the constricted ego. This is present moment awareness. The eternal now.

Early morning cold at the Lama Hotel

hard rain and fog

auspicious symbols on the torn yellow curtain.

The eternal knot and the conch shell

the symbols of the dharma.

We have breakfast of potato pancakes and hot tea.

Villagers huddle around the yak dung  fire in the kitchen

smoking and staring into the fire.

The rain ends right before we start.

We cross wet logs over the rushing stream.

We walk like the Zen masters of ancient times, watchful and alert.

A climb it is not up to the summit and down to the base

it is not a line with a beginning and an end

it is not a completion.

It is like the enso

the circular form of enlightenment

things come and go, come and go

the form and the void.

Dogen said that the ash and the charcoal are not the same thing.

Ashes have their own past and future,

charcoal has its own past and future.

They are separate events discrete in the here and now.

Each event flashes into the phenomenal world.

Only the present exists.

Each step on the path is a flashing of the now.

Every breath is an expression of the now.

On the path there is no past or future.

Only present moment awareness.

Only the step and the breath

the form and the void

the body and the spirit

my path through the fog and the mountains.

Why Do I  Retrieve My Memories?

Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present, the present either containing within it in a distinct form the ceaselessly growing image of the past, or, more profoundly, showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and still heavier load we drag behind us as we grow older. Without this survival of the past into the present there would be no duration, but only instantaneity.

Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics

Why do I fall into reverie, absent from the present, lost in memory, melancholia and dream?  Why do I follow its tangled threads down the dark labyrinth, searching for an experience of higher resolution and emotional power than memory can ever provide?  Confirmation of a life well-lived? Desperation for unity with the beloved? Longing for that which has been lost? Grasping after permanence? Desiring to suffer over the loss just one more time?  Escaping from the loneliness I feel in the present?

But to touch the reality of the spirit we must place ourselves at the point where an individual consciousness, continuing and retaining the past in a present enriched by it, thus escapes the law of necessity, the law which ordains that the past shall ever follow itself in a present which merely repeats it in another form and that all things shall ever be flowing away.

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

I think of Amsterdam and the boats. I struggle to resurrect my memory of that moment of perfect awareness that arose when I was looking at the boats in the canals by the Olympic Stadium.

I think of Valerie. I think of Pacific Beach and Sasha’s where we found each other. I struggle to resurrect my memory of our life in Encinitas at Moonlight Beach.

I think of mountain climbing in Nepal. I think of the Sherpa, the mountains, the snow and ice, and climbing late at night in the dark and the cold, praying for dawn. I think of fear and suffering. I think of the many times that I recovered from mountain climbing in the luxury and opulence of Amsterdam. I think of the shop windows on Utrechtsestrasse and the dead boats on the canals. I struggle to resurrect my memory of that moment of perfect awareness looking at the reflections of the shop windows, reflecting images back and forth like mirrors facing each other, infinitely, as the sun begins to set.

I want to sleep and dream and resurrect memory.

Why memory? We must have habitual memory to survive in society as Bergson  says.  It is our memory that defines our personalities and supports our existence. It is utilitarian. But I am concerned with pure memory.  Images of the past; remembrances. Why do we need pure memory? Is it intrinsic to the human condition that we must remember our experiences and hold onto them? How long should we spend in the revery of pure memory?  Is it because our memories are more pleasant than our present day reality? Is it our memories that confirm that we have led a good and full life? Yet, at the same time,  memories lead us to melancholy and despair over the loss of the thing that created the memory.

For Barthes and Proust, memory was stimulated by photographs, treasure boxes, perfume bottles, ashes, madeleine cookies and boots. For me, memory is triggered by place, photographs and things.  It is silent houses and palm trees; beaches in the setting sun. It is boats in canals. It is reflections in water and shop windows. It is my archive  of thousands of photographs. It is my Ganesh, conch shells and prayer beads.

I fall into reverie and search for threads of thought, fragments of memories, and wisps of dreams to transport me into the past. I want the past to be clear and strong as if I were living it in my present. I want to resurrect the past; to live again. Memories   slip through my fingers no matter how tightly I grasp them.  My past is protected by time and all that I have left are vague images, soft emotions and feelings of loss.

I never escape memory. The past always flows into the present. The present projects into the future. The future is fluid. There is nothing in front of me but fantasies,  projections, and the darkness that waits for me. I never enter the present, into instantaneity. The camera never captures the present. I live in the past or the future: I  reside in memory and fantasy. I am caught by the voices that never stop talking, that create  conflict, anxiety and despair. I am always photographing memory and transforming it into  paper images ever receding into the past until they  tear, fade, disintegrate into brittle shards, memory  dust in the bottom of the box.

Do I, in some strange way, wish to suffer? Memory only leads me to melancholy and suffering. Lawrence Durrell wrote in  Justine:

I never told Melissa of this; but often when I was alone at night while she was dancing, perhaps of necessity sleeping with her admirers, I studied this small bottle, sadly and passionately reflecting on this horrible old man’s love and measuring it against my own; and tasting too, vicariously, the desperation which makes one clutch at some small discarded object which is still impregnated with the betrayer’s memory.

I remember that perfect day in Amsterdam, September 23, 2016. What is the genesis of my desire to re-construct this memory? Perhaps to escape from my present situation, recovering from eye surgery after my descent from the high mountains of Nepal, lying unmoving, face down in bed in a hotel room in Delhi for the sixth day. The sulfurous sun and metallic polluted skies, the intense heat already rising in the early morning, the auto rickshaws trolling the streets, the trees outside my window blurred by my damaged eye, the awakening roar of the city. I want to remove myself from the strangeness of my present reality and inhabit a fantasy, a movement from the outer to the inner, from the sensory inputs and the fear to the peacefulness of a different quality of consciousness. This is not to seek a state of expanded consciousness; rather it is a movement to a different state  by slowly unhooking all of the physical and mental threads that bind me to my present reality.  I escape from the present reality of suffering into my memories of the past.

Killing the Present  by Taking the Photograph; The Metaphor of Impermanence

In the summer of 2018 I took a photograph of a boat in a canal across from the Olympic Stadium. When  I return to Amsterdam in the fall of 2018, I will visit the  canal and look for the boat. The boat may be completely submerged, it may be moved or overgrown by weeds. Perhaps I cannot even find the boat.

In the fall of 2018 I returned to the canal across from the Olympic Stadium. I cannot find the boat.  The scene in the original photograph, the canal and boats and bicycle and sky and grass and light, has vanished, never to exist again. I did not ever want to lose that moment;  I wanted to preserve it forever by taking a photograph. Why was that so? There  are so few perfect moments in life that is bounded by impermanence and suffering, we have an innate desire to grasp permanence, peace and happiness. When we find a perfect moment  we never want to let it go.  In our heart of hearts we know we will experience  more suffering  due to old age, sickness and death; we want to capture our precious pearls and keep them in our treasure chest. The irony of the human condition is that the more tightly we grasp after happiness, the more we suffer.

When I took the photograph of the perfect moment on the canal, I lost the moment forever. I broke the spell. By attempting to capture the present moment with a camera, I broke my state of pure moment awareness (my experience of the perfect suchness (tathata) of the boat, the bike, the canal, the world) which was why I was in a state of blissfulness in the first place. My consciousness moved from the present, the domain of Spirit, the abode of permanence and bliss ,  to the future, the domain of the ego, the abode of suffering.  By wanting to capture the present moment so that I could preserve and resurrect it later, I lost it. Desire always defeats present moment awareness.

When I take photographs I must be fully present in the world. I must observe the world as it is arising moment to moment. I must silence my ordinary thinking mind. If I do not see the world in front of me as it is, my photographs will fail.  Looking at the world when my mind is spinning its stories -when it is thinking- is like looking through a dirty window. All I see are my thoughts. I do not see the world. I must clean the window to see the world.  I can clearly perceive the world only in a state of present moment awareness. This is creative mind. Still mind is creative mind. The longer I am in a state of pure moment awareness, the more powerful is my perception and memory of the experience.

I am sitting on the grass at the canal and am looking at the photograph of the boat.  It shimmers, dissolves, fades. Memories  stimulate  virtual images. Fleeting feelings of melancholia and dreams. The images remix, a  montage. They become more visually complex, emotionally resonant. They become visually, temporally and emotionally dense. Circuits within circuits, images within images, mirrors within mirrors, reflecting infinitely down the long tunnels of my memories. Reveries. I am no longer there.

I want to return to the clarity of that perfect crystal day in Amsterdam, I want to keep that moment and hold it close. But I cannot; it is lost forever, and my memories have no more substance than the reflections of the clouds in the canals.

If I look at the photograph of the boat year after year, I will see an image that exists further and further into the past from the vantage point of my future present. In time, my memory of that day, even though it is triggered by the photograph, will become dim, fragmented, distorted and eventually forgotten. In time the print will disintegrate into dust, the boat will decay and sink, and I will pass into death. No photograph, no boat, no observer, no memory. The mirror is broken. It is all impermanence. It is all memento mori.

Photography is the great metaphor of impermanence. The referent, the print, and the observer all disintegrate in time. Photography attempts to resist impermanence by preserving the referent in a print. It is a comforting illusion.

The great irony  is that we want photographs  to preserve life and memory but this is false; photographs serve to  remind us of impermanence. They  reminds us that we will lose everything that is dear to us in the end.  Memento mori.

Memory In Camera Lucida

Barthes sits in his study in the autumn evening. His pencils, papers, books, desk and chair are arranged just so. He looks at old family photographs to search for his mother who has just died. He wants to remember his mother and to resurrect her essence. He becomes frustrated and imagines that he is like Sisyphus.

Barthes wrote that he wanted a “just” image of his mother. This is a reference to Godard’s statement that a photograph is not a just image; it is just an image.  For Godard, truth does not reside in images. However, Barthes find the “just image” of his mother: the Winter Garden Photograph. He wants to keep it on his desk but he finds it too painful:

Having received yesterday the photo I’ve had reproduced of maman as a little girl in the Winter Garden of Chennevières, I try to keep it in front of me, on my work table. But it’s too much-intolerable-too painful. This image enters into conflict with all the ignoble little combats of my life. The image is really a measure, a judge (I understand now how a photo can be sanctified, how it can guide it’s not the identity that is recalled, it’s, within that identity, a rare expression, a “virtue”).

Barthes, Roland; Richard Howard (2010-10-12). Mourning Diary (p. 220). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Barthes makes a subtle point about the content of an image. The image is not just the surface identity of the person depicted. Rather, it may illuminate a virtue, an unseen quality suggested by the image. Perhaps this quality may only be perceived by someone who is very close to the person shown in the photograph? Perhaps Barthes was only projecting his view of his mother as a virtuous and noble human being upon a  photograph? Perhaps he was thinking of his mother’s subtle body; perhaps her inner, blissful body?  Even so, we know that the photograph only describes the outer levels of the body in its grossest form; as a physical object; it can never capture the mystical, inners layers of the subtle body.

The Winter Garden Photograph stimulated an involuntary and complete memory of his mother in the Proustian sense.  (For Proust it was madeleine cookies and old boots that were the catalysts for his powerful memories). This photograph was an image of his mother’s truth: kindness and gentleness. This photograph united the essential being of his mother and his grief over her loss.

Barthes considered Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” For Proust, memory is more powerful than photographs. Proust expects nothing “from photographs of a being before which one recalls less of that being than by merely thinking of him or her.”

Even though a photograph stimulates memory, it may limit the strength and richness of memory because the image, our sense of sight, may overwhelm and distort the memory.  Barthes views this as the violence inherent in the photograph. In reflecting on  the Winter Garden Photograph Barthes said: “not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory… but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.”

In his frustration in failing to resurrect his mother, to capture her essence or to transform her photograph from an image of death to an image of life, Barthes can no longer look at the Winter Garden Photograph. He knew that it was impermanent: it would be attacked by humidity, decay and time; it would fade, weaken and vanish. The photograph is a proxy for time’s inevitable march, Kali’s scimitar, death. In despair he puts the photograph away in his desk; nothing left to say.

Nothing to say about the death of one whom I love most, nothing to say about her photograph, which I contemplate without ever being able to get to the heart of it, to transform it. The only “thought” I can have is that at the end of this first death, my own death is inscribed; between the two, nothing more than waiting; I have no other resource than this irony: to speak of the “nothing to say.”

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida at p 93

Barthes wants  to gather a “compilation” of photographs about his mother and to write about the photographs so that her memory would be preserved, at least for as long as he is alive. To preserve memory is to preserve life. If Barthes can remember his mother through photography and writing, then he can recognize, discover and resurrect her. This brings Barthes close to Derrida’s view that the purpose of writing is to preserve memory; it is not to create art or philosophy:

The suffering at the origin of writing for me is the suffering from the loss of memory, not only forgetting or amnesia, but the effacement of traces. I would not need to write otherwise; my writing is not in the first place a philosophical writing or that of an artist, even if, in certain cases, it might look like that or take over from these other kinds of writing. My first desire is not to produce a philosophical work or a work of art: it is to preserve memory.

Derrida-Copy Signature Archive

Barthes was not interested in preserving any memories or monuments about his own life. He was consumed with preserving memories of his mother. In the Mourning Diary he wrote:

I live without any concern for posterity, no desire to be read later on (except financially, for M.), complete acceptance of vanishing utterly, no desire for a “monument”— but I cannot endure that this should be the case for maman (perhaps because she has not written and her memory depends entirely on me).

Barthes, Roland; Richard Howard (2010-10-12). Mourning Diary (p. 234). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

The memory of his mother, the time that passes between her life and her death, the time that passes between her death and his death: the essence of it all: death, time and memory. Barthes is silent in the face of these inescapable realities. His only thought is that the death of his mother leads to his own death. There is nothing to do but wait for time to pass.

Sources of  memory triggers: cakes, boots, photographs, dreams and reveries

Consider Proust: In Search of Lost Time: seven books on time and memory. Proust felt overwhelming joy, an ecstatic experience-perhaps a non-dual experience-after eating a madeleine cake.

I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?

Proust, M. Remembrance of Things Past. Volume 1: Swann’s Way: Within a Budding Grove. translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Vintage. pp. 48-51.

Consider Proust: the act of drinking tea and eating a cake  stimulated a complete and involuntary memory that resurrected his grandmother: he experienced her living reality:

I was suffering from cardiac fatigue; and I bent down slowly and cautiously to take off my boots, trying to master my pain. But then, suddenly, my chest filled with an unknown presence; and I was shaken with sobs. For the being who had come to my rescue, saving me from barrenness of spirit, was the same one who, years before, in a moment of identical distress and loneliness, in a moment when I had nothing left of myself, had come in and had restored me to myself… I had just perceived, in my memory, the tender… face of my grandmother.

Proust’s memories were involuntarily triggered by his senses: the eating of the cake, the drinking of the tea, the putting on of the boots.  However, involuntary memory is subject to synchronicity; it cannot be voluntarily controlled.  Proust cannot re-create the same memories by eating another madeleine cake or putting on his boots again and again. Physical activity and sensory impressions are not intrinsic to stimulating memory in the same way as photographs.

Are the senses of touch, smell, taste and hearing  more powerful than the sense of sight as a stimulus to trigger memories?  Is a madeleine cake or a pair of boots a more powerful stimulus than a photograph? This is clearly so for Proust. Sontag said that Proust viewed photography as providing only weak memories as compared to memories that came from the other senses:

Whenever Proust mentions photographs, he does so disparagingly: as a synonym for a shallow, too exclusively visual, merely voluntary relation to the past, whose yield is insignificant compared with the deep discoveries to be made by responding to cues give by all the senses—the technique he called ‘involuntary memory’.

Susan Sontag, On Photography

For Barthes, perhaps it is smell that is the most powerful stimulant of memory?

In Proust, three senses out of five conduct memory. But for me, setting aside the voice, less a matter of sound, actually, than by its texture of perfume, memory, desire, death, the impossible return are not to be found here; my body does not consent to the story or the madeleine, the cobblestones, and the Balbec napkins. Of what will never return, it is odor which returns for me.

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

Proust said that merely thinking about a person is superior to photography as a stimulus for memory.  Are our thoughts and dreams a more powerful way to stimulate and access our memories than looking at photographs?

I can focus my thoughts to stimulate memories of the beloved. I can go deeper into my memories  through reveries, dreams or meditations. I can enter the dreamscape and walk down the corridors of my mind searching for the beloved and the quality of my emotions past.  My dreamscape  creates stronger memories than my photographs but they are more evanescent, unstable, fleeting, amorphous, abstract. They are more like clouds and photographs are more like rocks.  They are not  as reliable as photographs because they are not hooked into “reality” in the same way that photographs are. Photographs always yield the same image and their  associations with memories become stale and lose their emotional power.  When I enter the dreamscape, I do not know how may forks the paths may present nor which ones I may take.

My Objects, My Memories, My Circuits

On my writing desk is my conch shell from Nepal, a newsprint writing pad, a heavily marked copy of Camera Lucida and The Neutral, a tin cup holding pencils and pens, and the manuscript of this book in disarray. Photographs of Nepal are in a pile next to my lamp.

These objects create optical images; I see them with my eyes. They stimulate virtual images that are made from optical images and my memories, dreams, fantasies and reveries, all remixed into complex outputs of images.  It is a feedback loop: circuits reflect deeper and deeper layers of memory. There is a continuous flow of images and memories around these loops. They always produce reverie.

I pick up my conch shell and look carefully into its spiral chambers. The circuits of memory:

In the kitchen of the tea house a yak dung fire burns.

Pasang Dawa sherpa shows me his puja room

generations of Buddhas, tanka scrolls, and sutra books.

He lights a candle every morning and offers yak cheese to the Gods.

I climb to the stupa in the upper valley and sit at its base in zazen.

The spire collapsed during the earthquake.

The sun and the moon, the masculine and feminine,

the thirteen levels of the Boddhisattvas lie in the weeds.

I listen to the water roar and the wind blow

heart pulse beating in my ears.

The  yaks moan up the hill.

I feel the massive presence of Li Riyung

I cannot see the summit in the swirling fog.

The Buddha dharma is carried on the winds.

On the hillside painted on the rocks

is a great white conch shell.

The sound of the Buddha dharma

calling all who can hear the truth.

The sound awakens us from our ignorance

and reminds us to follow our Boddhisattva vows:

we must work to end the sufferings of all sentient beings.

In the monastery at Boudhanath

candles burn golden light in yak butter bowls

Buddhas watch in silence.

The wind horses are galloping

with red green white yellow and blue hooves

sending prayers to heaven.

Devotees bow kneel slide and rise

sandpaper sounds chants and bells

they always walk to the right

in endless ritual circles

like the turnings of the conch shell

their prayer wheels spinning endlessly.

Boddhisattvas are the great awakened beings

who take rebirth after rebirth

to end the suffering of all sentient beings.

The thunderbolt of compassion

the brilliant flash of perfect truth awakening.

The Boddhisatta Way.

Their great compassion!

Their  great prayers!

Where were the Boddhisattvas when China invaded Tibet?

Where were the Boddhisattvas when the great earthquake destroyed

Nepal?

Did we not blow our conch shells on those fateful days?

Did they not hear our summons?

But when does our suffering end?

The darkness of the inners chamber of the conch shell.

Mysteries within mysteries.

Writings as catalyst for memories; the Khumbu Valley

I am reading my journals that I wrote in Nepal many years ago. I climbed mountains as a spiritual pilgrimage. I wanted  an opening, a shift, a transformation from my stale, ordinary life. I wanted a satori. I wrote the journals in tea houses, in tents at high altitude, in lost caves and sacred the rivers; sometimes deep in the night sleepless. I wrote in cafes in Amsterdam, by the canals, dead boats slowly sinking.

I consider the photographs that I made in Nepal. I will not show them to you. You would see them as banal travel photographs. Even though they reflect powerful experiences for me, they would mean nothing to you.  As Barthes said in Camera Lucida: “For you, It would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ordinary.”

 

I consider the quality of my memories and emotions that arise as I read my journals and as I scan my portfolio of photographs. The journals create stronger emotions and memories than my photographs. Reading  allows me to more freely associate memories and sensations, to form circuits made of fragments, thoughts and reverberations of sights, sounds, experiences. It like tapestry. Photographs dictate my memories, they are locked within the image,  they are rigid and limited and  grow stale.

Himalaya means snow temple.

From the yak dung dust on the trail

to the peaks of the mountain gods

everything is vibrating with spiritual energy.

Prayer wheels filled with millions of mantras

spinning blessings to all sentient beings in the universe

the horses of the five colors fly on the winds.

Water flow turns prayer wheels over streams

yaks fly prayer flags from their horns.

In the darkness of the Namche Bazaar monastery

an old monk in brown and orange robes

slowly lights golden butter lamps

at the feet of the Boddhisatvas.

The dharma is everywhere

in the prayer flags wrapped around the stupas

in the prayer flags flowing from the suspension bridges

spanning huge gorges over crashing glacial rivers

in the prayer flags flying over the monasteries

high in the fog folding over distant peaks. 

The eyes of the Buddha see everything

from the yak dung on the trails

to the summits of the mountain gods.

Om mane padme hum!

The Buddha is the jewel in the lotus.

Wisdom and compassion are the Way.

I Can’t Rely On My Memories: Bladerunner

I can’t rely on my memories.

Rachel, Bladerunner

What if I cannot trust my memories? What if my memories are not my own? What if my memories are illusory, fantastical or delusional? What if they come from media images rather than my own experience and I cannot separate the two? What if my ego creates memories, fantasies, and delusions to protect myself from harm?  Does the failure of my memories to record my real and objective life experience weaken my authenticity as a human being?

In Bladerunner, Rachel, who is a replicant of a human being, believes that she is human because she has a photograph of her mother. It validates her childhood memories and proves that she is human. It is her certificate of presence as Barthes would say. However, her creator, Eldon Tyrell, had given Rachel a photograph of his niece’s mother because he wanted to implant memories to make her more human-like. When Rachel was told that the photograph was not of her mother, that the evidence was false, she dropped the photograph on the floor and cried. She was shattered. She realized that she was not human because she had no authentic memories.

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. Time is invention or it is nothing at all.

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

Dreams, memories and Photographs

The idea that death would be a kind of sleep. But it would be horrible if we had to dream eternally.

Barthes, Roland; Richard Howard (2010-10-12). Mourning Diary (p. 161). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Barthes dreamed of his mother yet he hated dreams. He knew that dreams could not resurrect his mother nor could  they recreate her essence. Dreams are evanescent, they are wisps of images, emotions, faded outlines  of memory. Dreams dissolve  when we try to remember them in the morning, like a drop of food coloring in the waterThey  never brought Barthes closer to his mother; they were never quite right, they were indistinct, vague, something was always missing. Barthes saw dreams as nothing but struggle and frustration. He compared his efforts to find her  essence to the tortures of Sisyphus.

And this quote from Camera Lucida:

I dream about her, I do not dream her. And confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labor: to reascend, straining toward the essence, to climb back down without having seen it, and to begin all over again.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Afternoon with Michel, sorting maman’s belongings. Began the day by looking at her photographs. A cruel mourning begins again (but had never ended). To begin again without resting. Sisyphus.

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

Dreams are fluid, flowing and dynamic. They have movement and sound, ambiguity and flow.  Dreams may be deep and emotional experiences, even though they may be fragmented and mysterious. Dreams are non-linear, they may loop into the past, present and future; they may fold back against themselves. Dreams may bring us  pleasure and joy or they may bring us  pain and fear. Dreams allow us  to enter into our  desires and  fantasies to experience  things which we  never could do in ordinary life.

My dreams are more powerful than photographs. I can search for stands of memories in my dreams. My experiences within the dreamscape evokes new memories and creates a new past.

Memories, dreams and fantasies transport me from my ordinary, constricted, egoic reality: I fall deeper and deeper into reverie. They are not experientially real but are emotionally true. What is more important? I feel longing and loss for Valerie. My emotions remain strong but my mental images of Valerie and our house on Moonlight Beach become shadowy, faint, dim.  Resurrect the memory, renew the dream. The photograph I have of Valerie has become faded and yellow, scratched and torn. It has become  just an image; its power to stimulate memory has been expended. It triggers memories of fragmented scenes from our relationship. Time passes, my memories become unstable and  fade. Some are kept, some are lost, others are re-imagined as fantasy or emerge as dreams. The photograph obstructs my memories, dreams and fantasies.

A photograph is like a stone, inert, heavy, static. Dreams are like water: fluid, flowing, dynamic, light, reflective.  Dreams bring me closer to the beloved than memories triggered by photographs. Dreams connect me to something mysterious that I cannot define or describe; perhaps it is the archetype of the collective unconsciousness. Photographs are  obvious; they do not vibrate with the mystery.

Barthes Desire to Understand Photography; My  Desire to Take Photographs

But isn’t desire always the same whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himehros, the more burning desire for the present being.

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

One function of the photograph is to provoke desire.

Barthes was overcome by an “ontological desire” to discover the essential  feature of photography that distinguishes it from all other images. The ontology of photography was a matter of existential survival.He had no desire to take photographs but rather, he was consumed with the desire to understand them. Would he  have penetrated more deeply into the essence  of photography if he was a photographer himself?

Barthes wrote about a photograph of an old house in the Mediterranean. This provoked a strong desire to live there. He did not know the roots of his desire but they were  deep and strong.  He imagined that he had  already lived there and he knew that he would live there someday. And, remarkably,  Barthes quotes Freud who said that there is no other place where we can be certain that we have lived than in our mother’s body.  For Barthes this awakened  his desire for the Mother, which, of course, is tied to his desire to reunite with his dead mother.

Photographs can, of course, provoke sexual desire. Barthes recognizes this and distinguishes between the “heavy” desire of pornography and the “light” desire of eroticism. He observes Mapplethorpe’s photograph of the young boy with the outstretched hand as a light desire.

In order to show you where your desire is, it is enough to forbid it to you a little (if it is true that there is no desire without prohibition).

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

I cannot escape the banality of my desire to create and preserve memory by taking photographs.  I am attached to experiences  that define my being, that give my life ballast.  I desire to possess and preserve that which I know I will lose. I desire to remember places where I have had spiritual awakenings, where I have experienced life the most intensely and where I was with the beloved.

I desire to possess. I take the photograph to possess what I see: “ I Want That!” Even though I may not be able to own the thing, I can own the image of the thing.  I desire to create images that have artistic quality. They may be beautiful or ugly but they must have artistic  quality. I desire strong  composition, dramatic light and dark and  emotional power. I desire to show my photographs but in new and creative ways.

 

Desire For The Dead Boats In the Amsterdam Canals

I look at my images of the dead boats.

The boats are chained to brown brick walls.

I search without finding and I write alone.

The boats do not transport me. They do not take me to the other shore.

I search without finding and I write alone.

The boats collect old shoes, empty cans, smoked cigarettes, plastic bags, dead leaves. The unwanted detritus flung by walkers from the canals above.

Rusted metal paint flaked from the hull faded red and yellow, rusted green flakes.

Greywood planks scored, nailed, staved, weathered by sea and salt and sun and time. Broken into shards. Stigmata. The three masted silent ghost ship sails from the harbor.

Oily water rainbows evanescent shimmering above the muck and wrack in the bottom of the boat.

Leaves decay into the muck and wrack in the bottom of the boat.

The boats rock softly in their sadness.

I search without finding and I write alone.

My photographs of the dead boats are  printed on cheap paper. They are torn, bent, creased and stained. Some are out of focus and over-exposed. I do not know when or where the images were taken. They were taken over many years and in many places. I search but my  memories are vacant. Was I happy or sad, lonely or loved, apathetic or energetic when I took these pictures?

What attracted me to take these photographs in the first place?

The decaying boat chained to the brown bricks of the canal wall?  Old wood and rusty chains? Stagnant water, algae and mud?  Tennis shoes, beer cans and trash? The reflections in the waters? The spatial ambiguity of a boat filled by a pool of water? Beauty and ugliness? Despair and purpose?  Symbols for my state of mind?

My desire to make singular and unique images that  escape the banality of images of canals, bridges, tulips and  pretty blond girls on bikes. My desire to create  images that have emotional power: I see beauty, I see complexity, I see concept expressed through image, and I want to possess all of it. My desire to create meaning in my life through photography.  The camera gives me purpose and is a tool to approach people and to bridge loneliness. With my camera, I can move through  the world.

My desire to convince myself that I have lived and lived well. My desire to remember important moments of my life when they  flow by too quickly. . My desire to respond to the emotional pull of beauty. To feel the beauty that I see in the world very deeply and to capture it, to preserve it and to defeat the inevitable decay of beauty into banality.  My desire to use photography may be a spiritual practice to unite with Spirit.

My desire to create, to possess, to capture, to imprison, to preserve life and to defeat death. And what is the genesis of my desire?  Eros and thanatos?  An expression of love or death, neither love nor death, or both? The primal forces, attracting and repelling me, in an endless dance?

Is desire an inescapable fact of the human experience? After all, in the Nasadiya Sutra (the 10th mandala of the Rig Veda), desire is the moving cause of the creation of the universe. It is the primal seed from which everything grows. Brahman creates  the universe through divine, artistic play.  Desire  is the animating cause of Brahman’s manifestation of the universe. I take photographs as an expression of my desire to create my own universe but I do not destroy. On the other hand, letting go of desire is the Buddhist path to nirvana, it is the boat that takes us to the other shore, from samsara to nirvana.

Ever desiring I see the manifestations, ever desire-less I see the mystery.

Desire For the Reflections in the Shop Windows On Utrechtsestrasse

I walk down Utrechtsestraat in Amsterdam. It is late afternoon and the sun is falling behind the buildings and the light is long and golden and soft. The trams slide by on their tracks and bicycles click on the brown bricks. Tram clangs and bicycle bells. The cafes are full of people drinking, smoking, talking, reading newspapers. Blonde girls on black bikes buy red flowers in the market. Boats rock gently, long tourist boats slide down the canals and sunlight reflects on the cold water.

I am wonderstruck by the shops and cafes and affluence. The shop windows are mirrors that reflect the windows directly across the street: signs, lights, tables, chairs, prints, displays, flowers.  Script floats on the surface of the windows. Mirrors inside of the shops reflect images, inside, outside, on surfaces. Flowers and tables, bottles and bars, models and mannikins. Dramatic light and shadows; the images change second by second as the light changes. The tram rushes and clangs down the tracks, a flashing of reflections in the shop windows and through the windows of the tram; silhouettes of people sitting in seats, motionless, staring.

I think of Nepal. The mountains, the tea houses, the trails always ascending, the cold, the clouds and the breathless. The cold hand on my throat, breathless at high altitude. Lang Tang villages destroyed by the earthquake, broken stone walls fallen, villagers weeping in tents. Boats float on the canal waters turning dark. I am overwhelmed by the beauty and the complexity of the images that I see around me.

I photograph every window of every shop on both sides of the street. These images will never exist again: the precise angle of the sun and the light, my position, the objects in the windows, the cars and people on the street, the camera angle, and the instant that light was captured by the sensor are all gone, they will never be replicated again.

That evening over dinner at Vosges, I review my photographs. I see the complexity of images reflected within images, the tension between the physical objects and their  reflected images, the distortion of the reflections, the double images and objects, the ambiguous spatial relationships, and the changes in the images of a shop window taken only seconds apart as the light changes ceaselessly. I look for composition, light, shadow, form, space, texture, pattern, rhythm, subject and idea. I look for those images with artistic quality. In an hour, the sun falls below the level of the canal houses and the reflections vanish.

Why did I take these photographs?. I was attracted by the complexity and beauty of the  reflections in the mirrors. I wanted to create and possess those images and the memory of that exact time and place. I wanted to create art. I knew that the light would change quickly, and the images would fade.  I wanted to make the impermanent permanent. I pressed the shutter,  images were  captured,  tension was released and desire was satisfied.

Today, years after these photographs were taken, I look at them again. I see quality in some of the images, I see failure in most.  I wish even the best images were better; there are always  weak elements. Desire  creates more desire; it is never satisfied.

Each year, when I return to Amsterdam, I walk along Utrechtsestrasse taking photographs of every shop on the street; I walk along the canals looking for dead boats;  searching for the perfect image to satisfy my desires.

Desire for Encinitas and Valerie

Memory makes my experience of Encinitas  powerful because it creates a web of associations that resonate with the present as I walk along Moonlight Beach . Water waves folding and falling endlessly.  I remember the night, the holding of the hand, the one breath together.  The call of the seagulls  reverberates from the past to the present. How many times have I heard that call? How many more times will I hear it?

Memory connects may past to my present.  It is never light and happy. . A past happiness  will never be relived again. Memory is a shadow cast over my present experience. Memory creates frustrated desire for that which has been lost;  it leads to frustration and melancholy.

And was the past happier than the present? Did it hold the same conflicts, anxieties and attachments, and was that past looking back to a distant past which may have been happier? Does this regression into the past ever end? Mirrors reflecting mirrors.  Illusion built on illusion.

Memory prevents me from experiencing Encinitas with new eyes, as if for the first time, fully present and open to its beauty. I see it with a mind that is attached to the past, that is seeking that which is lost forever, that is craving a past that no longer exists, that is longing to hold the hand and fall into the luminous blue eyes of sea.

If I had never met Valerie in Pacific Beach and walked on Moonlight Beach, if I had never seen the palm trees, slept in the cottage at Second Street and B, if I was seeing Encinitas for the first time, without being tied to my memory of Valerie, would I experience all of this with a clear mind, a mind not clouded with memory, loss, melancholy and regret? Would my present state be happier?  But I would never have been born in Encinitas.

It is just after sunset. The afterglow has faded and I can no longer see the silhouette of the palm trees. Over the Pacific it is dark, the sunsetting light is gone. The air is cooler now and faint breezes stir the fronds of the palm trees. I can hear the distant soft rush of the surf on Moonlight Beach. The evening star is a bright light rising over the sea.  And I wonder why I think of Valerie, I think of Valerie always. And I realize that she is just as much a part of this place as the beach, the palm trees, the brown cliffs, the ice plant, the curl and sound of the surf, the lifeguard towers, the lightness of the sea air, the salty decayed seaweed.  I cannot separate the two; Valerie is Moonlight Beach. She is Second Street and Avenue C. She is the La Paloma theater across the street. She is the Roxy ice cream shop. To see Moonlight Beach is to see Valerie. Or to see my memories of Valerie. They are one.

Valerie, Valerie, your black hair like a raven flying over the sea at night. Showers of stars. Oceanic luminescence.  You bright blue eyes. You are the light of the California dawn over the round golden hills. You are the air of the seasalt and the eucalyptus trees. You are the setting sun.

We walk on Moonlight beach, the cliffs fall, the sea breaks. I have no photographs of you. I have only my memories and dreams. Fading, indistinct, lost. In Pacific Beach I look for Sasha’s, it is gone, I walk on Moonlight Beach alone, the seafalls alone, time has passed, alone, memories fading, alone, your luminous eyes, alone, your long breath in the night, alone, your black hair shadow on the pillow alone, tears alone. You are lost  forever. Ravens.

Valerie loved Sasha’s in Pacific Beach. It was an old vegetarian restaurant with wood walls, plants, macrame and faded surfing posters. Buddha sitting  in the corner. We first held hands under the table at Sasha’s and no one knew. We would walk along the boardwalk in Pacific Beach watching the surfers and volleyball players, the skaters and the swimmers, the bikes, and the waves and the sand castles. The waves rolling and falling, sea spray along the white curl against the luminescent blue sky. Sometimes we walked through the side streets that ran parallel to the beach. Emerald, Felspar and Diamond. The setting sun made diagonals of bright light and long shadows in the gaps between the streets and the houses. The light sparkled like the facets of a gem. The houses were empty, silent, the streets deserted. Nothing but light and shadow. Stillness. Strangely deserted even though there were crowds of people walking, riding and skating on the boardwalk. We are holding hands, walking as the sun sets over the Pacific ocean. We sit on the sea wall and wait patiently for the green flash, unblinking, our eyes wide open, so we will not miss the light.

And I would call her early every morning from Point Loma where I was interning. I woke her every morning, I wanted my voice to be the first thing she heard.  We talked and she gradually awakened, ready to begin her day. At lunchtime, I would lay in the grass, looking up at the clouds and dream of Valerie and of holding hands last night and her black hair spread out like a raven’s wing on the pillow, breathing, breath, one breath as one, and I longed to see her, to touch her, to hold her, in the dream  in the grass I thought all of these things and the time that must pass before I could see her again became unbearable. Valerie is Moonlight Beach. She is my past, she is my present and both are lost in time.

I want to take photographs to stop the movement of time and change, to preserve my memories and to cheat death. I want those moments of peace and happiness and beauty to be permanent. I want to hold them close to my heart and keep them in their perfection and never lose them. I want to hold those moments of peace, purity and beauty. I want to walk along those streets in Pacific Beach, holding hands, standing still on the sand, and watch the sun set its golden light path across the surface of the sea.  I want to listen to her breath in the California night and to the surf falling and rushing on Moonlight Beach. I want her breath and my breath to become one. I know this moment will end and I will lose her forever. A soul death. I know this and I deceive myself. Suffering and pain and loss.

Photographs preserve none of this. To take a photograph of Valerie standing on the seabreak would have broken our unity, or soul sameness, the perfect moment gone by the interjection of the cold device, its control, its artifice. It’s violent tearing apart of the moment. No photograph stops time and preserves life. I do not have a photograph of Valerie; I only have my memories. Even if I did, I would not show it to you. It would just be another meaningless photograph of a pretty girl.

Today, thirty years later,  I am taking photographs of my life with Valerie in Pacific Beach and Moonlight Beach. I want to resurrect our experiences and preserve them in my memory. It is all gone but the wispy ghosts, faint in the fog.

Memory creates desire. Desire creates memory. To photograph these places, now much changed from thirty years ago, to remember and to desire creates melancholy. I am photographing melancholy. What will these pictures look like in another thirty years? Am I seeking to reconcile death (she is dead, I cannot find her), time and memory or does this only reinforce the cycle of desire, memory, loss and melancholy? What is the root cause of the cycle? What compels me to once again take photographs of empty houses in the fading  sunset light and the seashore of Moonlight Beach? What compels me to book a hotel on  Moonlight Beach?  Is it memory or desire or some  vague emotion caused by both?

La Jetee: Death, Time and Memory

This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood.

Chris Marker, La Jetee

In his film La Jetee Chris Marker tells the story of a man who witnesses a death at the Orly Airport in Paris. Paris has been destroyed in WW III, the world is a radioactive wasteland, and the survivors of the war live in underground stone corridors lined with enigmatic sculptures of headless statues, broken arms, eyeless, graveyards of fallen, cracked and disintegrating stone. Images of twisted anguish.

The victors use some of the prisoners like rats in laboratory experiments.

They are looking for a loophole in time to find food, medicine and energy for their own survival. They send the prisoners into the past and the future to save the present. The prisoners either die or go mad; the shock of time travel is too great. They needed a prisoner with strong memories and they found a man who was obsessed with the memory of a mysterious and beautiful woman at the end of the jetty at the Orly Airport.

The scientists send the man forward and backward in time to contact the woman. A falling man, a violent image, fear, a frozen sun. Broken faces stare mutely into the sky, frozen in postures of decay, amputation and suffering. Birds stopped in mid-flight. The creep of vines and plants, the dark soil, stone fallen, the wrack and loam of the jungle. The man is trapped in a labyrinth of time.

There is a cut to an image of an impossibly beautiful girl. The wind blows her long hair, her eyes are closed, her hand is on her cheek. He watches her sleep. At first they have no memories but time builds around them. His memories of the girl are fragile and unpredictable; there are gaps; he has no control over when the memories arise.

The man and the girl walk through a natural history museum looking at mummified animals in glass cages. Suspended bones of great prehistoric creatures. Animals transformed into statues, lifeless, frozen and dead. Time has frozen everything into statues, postures of anguish. Although they feel that they are alive, their death has already happened or it will in a matter of time. They are frozen in photographs like flies in amber.

The man travels to the future but the journey. He encounters future beings who can travel through time. They give him an energy source and invite him to remain in the future or they will close the gates to the future forever. The man decides to return to that moment of his childhood and to the woman of his dreams who awaits him.

The future beings send the man to Orly Airport in his past. He sees the woman. He knows there is no way to escape time and that this moment has been granted him to watch as a child.  At the end of the film, the man dies, running toward the woman. The image that always obsessed him was the moment of his own death.

Marker uses photographs to create a science-fiction story in which the present is seen as the past from the perspective of the future. Within the structure of the narrative, photographs show the past, present and future. Time is fluid and photographs are the medium.

The man’s strongest memory was that of the girl;  it sustained him through the horrors of nuclear war and the experiments which led to his madness and death. Did the girl exist or was his love for the girl a fantasy that he invented to survive the horrors of nuclear war?

Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. Later on they do claim remembrance when they show their scars. That face he had seen was to be the only peacetime image to survive the war. Had he really seen it? Or had he invented that tender moment to prop up the madness to come?

Chris Marker, La Jetee

In La Jetee death, time and memory are inseparable.

The man was given the choice of eternal life in the future but he chose to return to the past, to the memory of the girl at Orly Airport and to his own death. He choose the memory of the past that he  knew over the uncertainty of a life in the future that he did  not.  Perhaps the memory of being in love with a beautiful girl was the source of his decision to return to the past?  In the dislocation of movement through time, it was memory that sustained the man and that he grasped tightly to preserve his life.

And when he recognized the man who had trailed him since the underground camp, he understood there was no way to escape Time, and that this moment he had been granted to watch as a child, which had never ceased to obsess him, was the moment of his own death.

Chris Marker, La Jetee

Kali, the goddess of time, slays everything in the universe. Time is her weapon of destruction. Time and death are equivalent. We cannot escape time; we must meet our own death. The memories or fantasies of the love of a beautiful girl compelled the man to meet his inevitable death. We are born to die. Death always awaits us.

Time within the narrative of La Jetee is dense and complex. The man travels through the present, past and future. Are his experiences memories, fantasies, madness caused by the drugs given to him by the scientists  or alternate realities?  Are we, the viewer, watching the film from the past, present or future or all three? There are no absolute points of reference within the film that determine our temporal location.

According to Stephen Hawking in his book The Grand Design quantum physics demonstrates that the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. The future beings in La Jetee give the man a choice: he can live with them in the future or he can return to an uncertain past, which may mean his death. Since the past is only potentiality, the actions that we take today or in the future may affect our past. The man chooses the past: the final image of La Jetee: the man, running, falling, dying on the pier of the Orly Airport, the silhouette at the end of the pier, perhaps the girl or the angel of death.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                La Jetee is made from photographs of death, time and memory. It uses sophisticated theories of time to enrich photography as a philosophical, artistic and contemporary medium. It releases photography from its tired bondage of capturing and documenting the past. It is a shift from Newton to Einstein’s theories of time and space. It uses photographs in an original way to create and move through time: past, present and future are now our subjects. The choice of a time, the movement through time, the density of time, our death, the memory of our death, the new photography.

Marker used photography to subvert cinema. He created the illusion of a film by applying cinematic techniques to still photographs: sequencing, cross-cutting and sophisticated transitions between the photographs. The photographs are not animated by passing through a projector at 24 frames per second but, rather, the cinematic camera animates the still photographs.

Memories are echoes from the past that reverberate in the present. They are always selective, imperfect, re-mixes of past and present, actuality and fantasy. We do not retain all of our experiences as memories. Most of our experiences are lost in the flow of the stream of ordinary moments. We forget where we placed our coffee cup this morning and cannot remember what we had for dinner last Tuesday.  We retain other memories throughout our lives; they are branded into our synapses, they are our personas. What mechanism decides which experiences are retained and which are lost? Is it only the wounds, the things that pierce us, that we retain as Marker suggests? How can I trust that my memories are true? Some part of me, I know not which, may invent memories or turn fantasies into memories to give me psychological support to survive the suffering of living in the world. Which part of me decides?

In his film Sans Soleil Marker observed that we make and preserve memory with our cameras. Without images to record our memories, we would have no memories.

I remember that month of January in Tokyo-or rather I remember the images I filmed in that month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory – they are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don’t film, don’t photograph, don’t tape? How has mankind managed to remember?

Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

On a subway in New York is a beautiful girl standing by the doors, brown skin and blue eyes and black hair, delicate, a connection, a tentative smile, a memory of the girl sitting on the bench in La Jetee, a memory of the girl walking on Moonlight Beach, the train stops, the doors open and I walk out onto the platform. I turn, searching, the  doors close and I will never see her again. I have the memory of her recognition, her fleeting smile. I remember this scene and write about it a year later in Amsterdam and I edit my writing today, a year later in New York City. We remember some things but not others. Who decides what we remember? Should I have taken a picture to preserve the moment or would the act have destroyed the moment and this memory? And of what value is the preservation of this wisp of a memory derived from a moment of time? I only have longing made of memory. It will never become a touch. And someday even that will be lost.

Krishnamurti Flight of the Eagle, Freedom From the Past and Memory

Thought carries experiences that we have had in the past into the future through memory.  Thought is never new; it is always old. Thought is never free because it is tied to experience. It never sees anything new. I am a prisoner of thought. To see the sea, the sand and the clouds at Pacific Beach, I must still my mind. Otherwise I am not actually seeing the world; I am only looking at a mental image generated by my memories. All I see are my thoughts rather than the world as it arises moment to moment.

My sense of “I am-ness” frustrates my perception of the present. It is bound by desire and its grasping for security, happiness, gain, possession. It is driven by fear and anxiety and is always seeking security. It re-engineers the past to secure the present. The machinery of the mind is constantly whirring around and around, generating conflict and  vanquishing present awareness. The present is the place that the ego cannot control because the present is silent and silence is not its natural state. To be present is to silence the egoic self and it  fights relentlessly to pull the mind back into the past and the future and into its dualities and conflicts. It  will do anything to avoid present moment awareness because in that state it  is silent and that is not its natural state.

What is the quality of a mind that is still? J. Krishnamurti explains it this way:

In that silence there is no `observer’ at all; that quality of silence has vast space, it is without border and intensely active; the activity of that silence is entirely different from the activity which is self-centered. If the mind has gone that far (and really it is not that far, it is always there if you know how to look), then perhaps that which man has sought throughout the centuries, God, truth, the immeasurable, the nameless, the timeless, is there – without your invitation, it is there. Such a man is blessed, there is truth for him and ecstasy.

J. Krishnamurti, Flight of The Eagle

With a still mind there is no longer an egoic “I” that filters and constricts our awareness and limits  our perceptions to  thought. We open into a spaciousness, into a vastness, into the timeless state. This is the abode of creativity; we access the wellspring of original mind. We see the world as it  is and we photograph new and fresh images. We no longer capture images that are corrupted by our thoughts, we have removed the filters that distort our perceptions. Our vision becomes clear. Original photographs arise from this new sight.

What Is Remembered? Memories Make Photographs and Photographs Make Memories

And you tell me my other self will you answer me at last I am tired of you I want you I dream of you for you against you answer me your name is a perfume about me your color bursts among the thorns bring back my heart with cool wine make me a coverlet of the morning I suffocate beneath this mask withered shrunken skin nothing exists save desire.

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, (quoting Sollers)

At Moonlight Beach I feel the hot sand on my feet, run my hands along the rough edge of the palm trees, swim in the cold water and let the waves fall over me. I breathe the salt air and the wave sounds, see a surfing movie at La Paloma, have ice cream at the Roxy. I photograph this.

Photographs become memories and memories become photographs. They are a feedback loop that create derivative images. Do the photographs create false memories? Do the memories create false photographs? Does the circular flow of memories and photographs support a narrative that becomes a fantasy or a reality: the black haired girl in a garden as the long summer sun sets golden across the still sea softly long and silently longing the undersea mystery in the depths and the flowers her blue eyes and the cool soft touch of her hand and the nightfall mystery lost on Moonlight Beach.

She loved holding hands and she held them tight. When you were with Valerie you knew it.  Bright blue eyes, long black hair, teeth almost too white, olive skin.  Her beauty was electric and we were together and someone once said that they could see we were on love from a block away. We radiated love, we were one, holding hands and walking and nothing in the world existed but our circle of energy and love.

No one can photograph this.

Photography is Life and Death, Time and Memory; Ode to Palinode

To say that all photographs of people suggest death because they will die in time, or are already dead, is reductive and simplistic. Barthes concedes this point  at the beginning of Camera Lucida. To say that the disintegration of the image from paper to dust is a metaphor of life decaying into death or that my self-portrait, which instantly recedes from the present to the past, is an arrow of time that points to my future death is similarly hackneyed, obvious and boring.  Of course, we know that poor Lewis Payne was alive when the photograph was taken in 1865 and that he died two weeks later when he was hanged. Even if he had not been hanged and died a natural death, he would have been long dead when we look at his photograph today.  Barthes looks at his mother as a child in the Winter Garden Photograph and knows  that she will be dead in her future and that she is dead now.

Barthes realized that he had expressed banalities about death in the Part One of Camera Lucida and changed his course. He knew that he was caught by his subjective preferences and desires about certain photographs and that this would not lead to universal truth. He knew that he had not found the Form of photography. He recanted Part One of Camera Lucida, his ode, and wrote Part Two as his palinode. The concern and mood of Camera Lucida shift from philosophy to mourning but, as always with Barthes, the lines are never clear.

We live in a world characterized by pairs of opposites. Male and female, light and dark, negative and positive, pleasure and pain, good and evil, matter and spirit, form and emptiness, and  life and death. When Barthes said that the essence of photography is death, he neglected life, the other side of the duality.

Photography must embrace both life and death to be true. To embrace only death and to reject life is to deny the fundamental structure of the universe. Just as light cannot exist without the darkness, as sound cannot exist without silence, as form cannot exist without emptiness, life cannot exist without death. The universe is one, it is a whole but it manifests as multiplicity. We see and experience the world as duality. But this is only an appearance. It is maya, it is illusion, it is Brahman manifesting the world in an infinite variety of forms as an expression of the divine creative play. It is the Platonic Form manifesting the particulars.

The Taoist expression of duality, which Barthes wrote about extensively in The Neutral, is the yin and the yang.

The yang is the on, the positive, the crest of the wave, the light. The yang is the sun, the father, the active, the intellect. The yang is heaven.

The yin is the off, the negative, the trough of the wave, the darkness. The yin is the moon, the mother, the passive, the intuitive. The yin is earth.

Yin and yang are not separate qualities, they are interdependent. There is no yin without yang. They are one and the same, inseparable, like the heat and the flame. They exist in harmony:

Look, it cannot be seen-it is beyond form.
Listen, it cannot be heard-it is beyond sound.

Grasp, it cannot be held-it is intangible.
These three are indefinable;

Therefore they are joined in one.

Tao Te Ching, Verse 14

The yin and the yang are enclosed by the circle of the Tao as one. They flow together as the universal way. The shape of the border between the yin and the yang is in the shape of a sine wave. The oscillation, the crest and the trough over and over again into eternity. Darkness within light and light within darkness.

Therefore having and not having arise together.

Difficult and easy complement each other.

Long and short contrast each other:

High and low rest upon each other;

Voice and sound harmonize each other;

Front and back follow one another.

Tao Te Ching, Verse 2

The essence of photography, its eidos, its Form, must embrace the fundamental truth of the universe: unity manifesting as duality, form arising out of emptiness. It must embrace both the yin and the yang.  It must show us both life and death.  It must pierce through the veil of illusion and show us the unity behind the dualities. It must show us the interdependence of the dualities. If it cannot show us these things, if it can only show us one side of duality, then photography remains a broken half-truth.

Photography is like a sine wave. The universe of images oscillates between life and death, present and past, truth and lie, reality and  illusion, form and emptiness, duality and non-duality. The Form manifest the particulars. The wave raises and falls between the yin and the yang. The ten thousand things rise and fall, rise and fall endlessly.

The ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang. They achieve harmony by combining these forces.

Tao Te Ching, Verse 42

We cannot seek the yang and avoid the yin.

We cannot seek the light and avoid the dark.

We cannot seek permanence and avoid impermanence.

We cannot seek form and avoid the formless.

We cannot seek the positive and avoid the negative.

We cannot seek the active and avoid the passive.

We cannot seek the hard and avoid the soft.

We cannot seek the male and avoid the female.

We cannot seek the father and avoid the mother.

We cannot seek heaven and avoid the earth.

We cannot seek the sun and avoid the moon.

We cannot seek beauty and avoid ugliness.

We cannot seek death and avoid life.

Identifying dualities and picking one side or the other is not the way of truth. There is no figure without the ground, no wave without the trough, no sound without the silence, no light without the darkness. Truth resides when we transcend the dualities and experience the unity that lies behind all phenomena. This is the state of non-dual awareness; it is a mystical state of consciousness. We no longer see the the mountains, the sky and the clouds as beautiful, we become all of those things, as they arise, as they go moment by moment.  We have dropped the body and the mind. We are pure awareness; we are a silent witness. This is a becoming Spirit.

Camera Lucida is based on duality: ode and palinode, studium and punctum, reality and illusion, life and death.  Ironically, Barthes does not recognize and outplay the dualities by exploring the spaces between the dualities as he does in The Neutral. He does not play his own game. He only sees death. For Barthes, the print represents a flat death; it is never represents three-dimensional life. Barthes writes in Camera Lucida:

Life / Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print. With the Photograph, we enter into flat Death.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

There is one play to make: the transformation of ordinary consciousness to non-dual awareness through spiritual practice. It is the only way to see the whole rather than the parts, the unity behind the multiplicity, the Form behind the particulars.  This is truth and photography must show us truth.

I modify my original thesis, I recant my ode. I have gone deeper into myself, I have encountered the sages and the philosophers,  I have discovered that the Form of photography is not only death, time and memory. The Form of photography is also life.

The Form of photography is death, time and memory and life.

This is my palinode.