Life …in Real Time

Aug 28 2011

There is no family album

No snapshots, in black and white

no fading Polaroids.

No archive

of Super 8

Where children perform for the camera

on technicolor grass.

Against a backdrop

of sensible houses

with gravel driveways

and big American cars,

all buffed chrome, and puffy whitewalls.

My parents were camera shy,

not much for pictures.

Too busy, perhaps,

working weekends

scrimping.

In an era where they saw no need

to immortalize us

for posterity,

and there was no such thing

as “child-centred parenting.”

As was said, back then

kids were meant to be seen

not heard.

Perhaps if I had kept a journal,

like a little girl’s diary

with its skeleton-key lock.

Or a stack of yellowing foolscap

in careful block letters,

a solemn record

of the daily events

that matter to boys.

One of many good intentions

left unmet.

There are, of course, school yearbooks

a museum of report cards.

And class portraits, formally posed

  —  4th from the left, back row.

And a battered box

of random photos,

undated, unmarked.

Looking back

is like shuffling through that battered box,

unconnected snapshots

of a past I can’t be sure.

The blur of memory

confabulated, concocted

remade.

The toddler in a sandbox.

A suburban childhood.

The awkward coming-of-age.

Today’s child exists

in endless videos,

digital pictures

that fill the ether.

Which will never be viewed again,

because doing so would take a whole new life

in real time.

This is the problem

with too much information,

you can as easily get lost

as with none.

Like a drop of water

in the hundred-year-flood,

the feeble signal

when the noise is too much.

And now, all grown-up

I will only take pictures

on special occasions.

Pictures of consequence  —

the gravity

of rites of passage,

the weight of intent.

Which is very much how art works,

distilled, selective, compressed

down to the essentials.

A still life

as eloquent as Haiku

as elegant as a portrait.

Into which you gaze

long and deep,

and find yourself able to see

so much more

than the moment.

I was born in the mid-50’s, so that image of post-war houses – claustrophobically small, by today’s standards; and mostly treeless, with the driveways still unpaved – and of incongruously big cars – with ostentatious whitewalls, and lots of chrome –  is exactly what I see in old family photos.

The idea for this poem came from a brief conversation with my neighbour, and her photogenic (of course!) granddaughter. I asked about pictures, and with a slight roll of the eyes she said the doting father (her not so favoured son-in-law) records just about every second!

What a contrast to my own experience, which comes not only from a different era, but from a different family culture as well. Back then, no one felt this relentless pressure to document everything; and there certainly wasn’t today’s seductively easy technology. And we were not picture takers. So all there remains is something like that battered box in the poem. (As it happens, my sister-in-law – who is ferociously organized and industrious – organized and researched what there was, and in the end did manage to assemble a (very incomplete) album.)

I think the eye roll is deserved. Because all this picture and video-taking pulls us out of the moment:  everything becomes a “meta” experience, in which we’re too aware, self-conscious, detached.

And the irony is that the vast majority of this stuff will never – can never – be viewed:  as I said, it will “take a whole new life in real time”!

I think pictures should involve meaning and intent. Filming everything is like filming nothing. Which is where the comparison to art arose. If you throw everything into the hopper, something of beauty or significance may happen to emerge:  as a million monkeys randomly typing for a million years might just happen to produce Hamlet! But I don’t think anything can be art unless it’s conceived and executed with conscious intent:  a process of winnowing, elimination, choice; of discriminating between the good and the bad, the virtuous and the inept.

So the record of my neighbour’s granddaughter Hazel would be so much more meaningful – and useful – if it was done with more thought and thrift.

I’m left thinking of those monstrous clouds of digital data, kept alive in immense electricity-gobbling data banks:  none of which is of any use, or will even be re-visited.

And I’m also thinking of those who fear we live in this surveillance society; the kind of people who are paranoid of government. What they don’t realize is that there is nothing to fear:  there are so much data constantly pouring in, it’s virtually impossible to be overheard. You couldn’t find more privacy than in all that noise!

And I’m thinking how solipsistic – and even narcissistic –  all this is.

And I’m thinking of the power of a single still photo:  how much there is to see, when you have the freedom to stop, and look around.