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Bereft of a true home, I dwell instead in sentiment and practice the collection of numerous small tokens thereof: an olive-pin, a tea-tag, a berry-shell, a fortune. I treasure the incitement of memory brought about by these little markers in time-passed, as I do that incited by the more obvious strains: postcards and Polaroids and locks of hair … and these too I try to accumulate, these too light me! But perhaps what is most meaningful is the undisplayable — that which is gone — letters received and lost, letters writ and never sent and lost; a poem misplaced in the loose-leaf of a moulting notebook. A garland of flowers or bouquet that remains only in a blurred photograph; a collection of photographs drowned in a flood. Since my adolescence, some of most beautiful pictures I’ve made on my cameras have been the nonexistent — the mechanisms failed or my Nosferatuesque fingers blocked the lens or or the memory card betrayed me or the film was overexposed through actions entirely beyond control — yes, the most beautiful, I say! It is just so. I can picture them all behind my eyes in perfect clarity — so so beautiful — as beautiful as the flowers that nevermore will fragrance a room and all those words which forevernow lay unread. I can’t speak exactly to the wider benefit of this “recommendation”. But somehow this is the sort of thing that makes me happy.
May 10, 2023