The Self-Important “Now”

Aug 12 2017

I look at black-and-white pictures

from back when I was a kid

and it seems more anthropological

than personal.

Yes, I was alive

in those tumultuous times,

but too young to be part of history.

And the incongruous mix

of mid-century modern

with what seems from a previous age

is not at all how I remember it.

Like seeing the first Mustang,

adjacent to post-war DeSotos

Studebakers laden with chrome.

Or political hacks, who backed Jim Crow

caught by the camera's indiscriminate eye;

background men, fading to grey

when Camelot came true

and glamour ruled.

Or hippies and peaceniks and student radicals,

whose photos still look just as cool

as when love was free

and youth eternal

and the boomers first

discovered themselves.

Along with lean men

in narrow ties and snappy hats

and thick owlish glasses.

And lumpy housewives in mousy frocks,

sporting cat's-eye frames

and beehive hair

and formidable corsets and bras,

pocketbooks clutched

in white-gloved hands.

But it's the absence of colour

that's truly distancing

and makes the past unrecognizable.

Monochrome photos,

drained of blood

forever young.

Black and white figures, fixed in time,

so they seem more iconic than real.

I know this

after seeing World War II in Colour,

an eye-candy film

that jolted the 40s to life.

Dances, and Big Bands

and rallies of Hitler Youth.

Sleek battleships

on postcard-blue seas,

the daily life

of Parisian streets.

Not heroes of war

but young men I might have known;

sharing cigarettes, relaxing on deck,

strong, and tanned

and clowning for the camera.

And their girlfriends, so beautiful

in the achingly brief

flower of youth.
Still in bloom, on celluloid,

never imagining themselves

the buxom grandmas, and shuffling veterans

I remember from childhood,

their settled world

utterly gone.

I remember how we, too

felt ourselves the height of modernity

in the self-important now,

contemptuous of the world

that came before.

Just as today

a generation is absorbed

by the dazzle of technology

and blinkered self regard.

So will they, looking back

also patronize our innocence, romanticize our time?

Just as we have done

with these photographs in black and white

and endless shades of grey,

the captured moment

freighted with meaning

no snapshot could ever contain?

Must the past always remain

a foreign country?

So that even to those who were there

it never quite feels like home.