From the clutches of posterity
I started carrying my camera around a few days ago. I pulled it out for the first time since I arrived in Thailand; dusted off the case, charged the batteries, and made sure it was still working. There are so many things I see every day, things I take for granted after four months in Nong Khai – the golden-green garden at Mut Mee, the wide slow Mekong, the way the sun shines through the palm trees on the temple grounds across the street. These are all beautiful places. These are places that are a part of me now. I wanted to record the images and in some way the experiences I’ve had here.
I started off taking a few pictures of my house. It was okay. The pictures didn’t look like how it feels to live here, though. Later that day I went to take some of the river. One from the same angle I stood while watching my novella float away, bound for Cambodia. One overlooking the stairs where I sat and played music with a group of teenage Thai boys in the early hours of the morning. Another of a staircase where I sat moving my feet around in the mud before jumping in the river to escape the vulnerability of a conversation with someone I could have loved.
And then I stopped, knowing I wouldn’t take any more and that I would erase the ones I already had. What’s the point of these photos? I don’t want to remember any of these experiences. At least, I don’t want to remember them dead and frozen in the light of day, drained of the passionate spontaneity that made them valuable in the first place.
I have very few photos from the times in my life when I was the most alive. There was no thought of creating a record. To attempt to crystallize a moment of joy, of passion, of change, is to admit defeat on a grand scale. So those moments are recorded as emotional impressions – imperfect, imprecise, ephemeral, shifting like rainbows on the nighttime streets of my memory’s imagination. And I believe that is the way it should be.
Tags: Nong Khai, Thailand
sandra_101
you dork. the rest of us stuck here want to see photos of where you spent your time in thailand!
You’re a dork. OK fine here’s a word picture – roosters, dusty streets, big mud-colored river, lots of asians everywhere. Happy now?
NO! i can’t imagine that at all. I have no imagination. I need photos.
where are you? check in missy!