Feeling

fog 5
Originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

‘Each of us is grazed at least once, perhaps more than once, by the power of this question.

The question looms in moments of great despair, when things tend to lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured… It is present in all moments of rejoicing, when all the things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time, as if it might be easier to think that they are not than to understand that they are.

The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not.’

Heidegger, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, trans. R. Manheim

Life and things

br 15, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

Sometimes I just feel like part of the scenery. How can you engage with the world when you are the world? How can something physical capture anything more than the physical?

In the world, life and objects meet, interact, happen. In a picture, life can never exist. Everything is an object, for everything is colours and lines on a 5×7′ piece of glossy paper.

I touch my desk, a book, a mug of tea. I’m alive, moving, choosing. I am me, rippling and humming with facets. But in a photograph I’m just as static and inhuman as any object. All flat in lines and a present past. All dead but seeming real. And there’s half a heartbeat of me, with that thought in my head, words frozen mid-flow in the space of my mind like juggling balls. Feeling angry, disappointed, satisfied, deceptive, victorious? You’d never know if I was one or none or all of them at once; I’m not just alive, I’m beyond alive, unreachable, unseeable, unthingable.