Writings from a Dimly-Lit Interior

Today my thoughts emerge from a dimly-lit interior. The tightly sealed window beside me is no barrier against the icy vapor of  mid-Atlantic Winter's ghost from settling on my bare arms. An even silvery light pooling on an otherwise dusty space. I squeeze my eyes shut and imagine the frame as it would appear on a developed contact sheet, perhaps suspended between between frames 22 and 24-- a miniature rendering of reality, suspended in a reel of ordinarily explicit 35 mm moments. The contact sheet serves as a reminder that it is I who chooses to enlarge a moment from this negative reel and burn it as a 8"x10" silver gelatin print, and maybe even 11"x14" if I'm feeling particularly attached to the feeling. Otherwise, it remains as elusive as a look from afar at a somewhat shadowed train window;  you examine whatever is behind it without really penetrating the pane. 

But I am oddly feeling peaceful. The mental exercise is to keep the nostalgia from slipping into angst and listlessness. Finding stillness... (Then jumping out of the frame to document the moment.)

The thing I love about photography capturing a moment is that a single click that captures 1/60 of a second is capable of conveying a sentiment that takes well over 60 clicks of the keyboard, words that can quickly go from being langourous to tedious. I am reminded of J. Alfred Prufrocks visitations down half-deserted streets and hope my words aren't as as tiresome and confusing...

The light is slowly dissipating, and the intentional silencing of my own words creates room for the the amorphous ones of another,

"It would be comforting if love were an energy source which continued to glow after our deaths. Early television sets, when you turned them off, used to leave a blob of light in the middle of the screen, which slowly diminished from the size of a florin to an expiring speck. As a boy I would watch this process each evening, vaguely wanting to hold it back (and seeing it, with adolescent melancholy, as the pinpoint of human existence fading inexorably in a black universe)." A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes