A certain someone turned two recently and I can’t help but reflect not only on these past few years but upon the nature of the past and its reflection on the lives we lead now. There is a deep part of me that believes that the past never existed and the future will never be here — but as I approach my later years, I know this is not true.
Further, it’s this complex of suspicions, arrogance, and insecurity that makes me question the past and how it is and how it lives in our lives. Afterall, I look at the photos of this certain someone and note the change in expressions, in bodily form, in composition, and in personhood, all of which are either communicated through photography or have accomodated our drive for having those things communited to us. But I’m less interested in how someone like Susan Sontag would describe the perception of the world through these images than I am in the way that I now interpret the past through the scrim of these photos and how that veil is more or less a distant shadow of me.
Let me try to be more clear. I see an image from the past. I know that person and that time of my life inherently, coherently. It moves me and I then see the world as someone would after my death, through my eyes, without them being me and perhaps never knowing me. It’s as if the photos are personal and profoundly apart from me and the shadows they cast are that of death, which is both personal and profoundly apart from me as well.