'But what if we are at the crossroads, as the blues singers moan, longing for something else, neither diversion nor distraction, escape nor mere entertainment'
Phil Cousineau
‘To people the world over, pilgrimage is a spiritual exercise, an act
of devotion to find a source of healing, or even perform a penance. Always, it
is a journey of risk and renewal. For a journey without challenge has no
meaning; one without purpose has no soul’ (Phil Cousineau, The Art of
Pilgrimage).
This is how I
approach my mother’s photo albums. Neatly tucked away at the back of my
cupboard, where I have to recruit the assistance of a chair, to be able to
reach them. There are two of them, one burgundy and the other mahogany and they
are considerably heavy as I move them from the top shelf onto my bed. I am at a
crossroad, my soul weary, my bones heavy and I’ve come to these albums for
answers, for direction and for healing. To go through my mom’s albums is to go
on pilgrimage, is to move from a Here to a There while remaining in the
confines of my room. Right before I open the first one I sigh, physiologically, and prepare myself for the challenges that the sojourn always raises within me;
the evocation of ‘emotion and commotion‘ as Cousineau puts it. These albums are sacred to me, and they pull
back the curtain slightly on the life the woman who gave birth to me lived. She
is beyond the veil now and yet she still speaks to me through her history. She
beckons, encourages, clarifies, and guides. ‘The point of a pilgrimage’, writes
Cousineau, ‘is to improve yourself by enduring and overcoming difficulties’…
and I need improving, in ways only my mother can understand.
As I crack open
the first album, its sheaves are stuck together. I separate them and can feel
the intensity of the moment build. I’ve visited these albums before, but there
is still a hesitation behind my actions, a knowing that whatever is revealed must
be obeyed; that is the imperative. This is how it works with arcana; I speak to
my mother through photographs, implore and wrestle with her. Carl Sagan, a
resounding voice, ‘we make our world significant by the courage of our questions
and the depth of our answers’. So, I ask courageous questions and I am met
with deep answers. Each photo is a part
of a larger narrative, it’s a story unfolding, revealing its essence at the
deepest level. People casually and whimsically describe this as walking down
memory lane. Although there is nothing whimsy about it, it is a lane that needs
to be walked, to be traversed. ’Pilgrimage means following in the footsteps
of somebody or something we honour to pay homage. It revitalizes our lives,
reinvigorates our very souls’ (Costineau). Following these footsteps and
unlocking the clarity of my own path cannot be rushed. These photo albums hold
duration within them. Their assembly was a protracted affair, it was undertaken
with great care and consideration and that is what each picture, in turn,
requires of me. Byung Chul-Han in The Scent of Time writes, ‘The path
which separates the place of departure from the place of arrival is also an interval.
Like place itself, it is semantically rich. The path of a pilgrimage, for
instance, is not an empty space between two places that is to be traversed as
quickly as possible. Rather, it constitutes the very goal to be reached. Being-
on- one’s way here is altogether meaningful. The walking means doing penance, healing,
or gratefulness… it is a prayer. The pilgrim’s path is not merely a
thoroughfare, but a transition to a There. In temporal terms, the pilgrim is on
the way to the future, which is expected to bring salvation.’
I can’t help but
contrast this rich, intense way of keeping record with todays’ electronic
albums which are emaciated and weak in comparison. Modern day photos are way
too easily retrievable. They can all be accessed at a swipe. There is no
preparation needed either to access the pictures and they are always within arm’s
reach. The voluminous number of the photos compromise any significance they may
possess. The photos comprise mostly of faces without contexts; without a
semblance of connection; just sameness with different backgrounds. The photos
are merely a matryoshka doll reflecting ourselves back to us at the surface level
as the screens through which we view the photos do. Empty and emptying in their
proliferation. Han writes, ‘Electronic memories and other technological possibilities
for recurrence destroy the temporal interval which is responsible for forgetting.
They make what is past instantaneously retrievable and available.’ Part of
being human is the ability to forget- that is the healing grace of time. There are
things that we are the better for having forgotten. Yet electronic memories do
not permit us to forget, and we face death by a thousand cuts constantly reliving
painful and unhelpful events. Because of digital media’s ahistoricity, we have
no past to speak of, everything can be conjured into the presence as
fast as our thumbs allow. This is itself an unkindness. There are no spaces of
introspection and growth when everything you’ve ever done is immediate. Society
judges you harshly on the things you said or did at 15 and at 50 alike. There
is no space for redemption. Redemption is narrative and our digital spaces lump
everything together. All specificity is lost, and this is why we age, and we do
not grow older. There is no distance between events and the contemplative and introspective
aspects of those events. As Han writes, ‘An event is not a theme to which
consciousness could relate, but a trauma which cannot be captured by
consciousness, which is entirely outside its control or annuls it.’ These
events become doubly traumatic because these digital spaces are intolerant of
second chances. Therefore, we indiscriminately carry these things with us.
Our brains have
evolved in such a way that our memories themselves aren’t concrete; they are
porous and continuously reconstruct themselves. I can’t help but think this is
for our ultimate good. Our brains are protecting us from things we would
otherwise be unable to handle were we required to take them in directly. Our
brains allow us to put things in the past; even the sting of difficult things
has been devenomized. Our brains filter and dilute events into things we can
swallow to ensure we can still carry on living. Our feet are buckling under the
weight of our present-past. And because the digital footprint does not discern,
neither does it make any concessions; our memories are cold, hard-as-stones
facts. The digital space does not hold back any blows, everything is there and
anyone with an internet connection can access it and a savvy-coder can hack into our clouds. Forgetting brings a lot of healing and it can also bring
freedom and unburdening. The digital space is quite the nuisance at reminding,
it picks scabs and it unrelentingly burdens. This process is additive, we are
forced to take in and contain more and more memories without the ability of
letting anything go. This compulsive remembering flagellates and offers no
penance. We are abelian sandpiles and some of us won’t survive the avalanche to
re-form again.
My mother’s photo
albums are a site, an in-heritage site for her daughters. They are movable
locations where pieces of her social, political, cultural, and spiritual
history have been preserved. They hold heritage value and lingering power.
Electronic memories, however, are sights. ‘Sights are places one passes by.
They do not permit any lingering or staying’ (Han). You see them and move from one photo to the
next as though driving fast by them. It’s the feeling evoked when listening to
Daniel Caesar sing Streetcar, ‘Seems like streetlights, glowing,
happen to be. Just like moments passing in front of me.’ You are persistently
swiping or scrolling from one picture to another that it’s a blur. Even
though, they themselves are in the photos, they seem to be having an out-of-
body experience and are disconnected from the people in the photos because they
can’t reconcile the evidence of photos and the lack of experience the photos
allude to. The Baudrillard inspired ‘frenetic stillness’ comes to mind:
the rush of historical events only provides scant cover for (and ultimately, in
effect, produces) a standstill. People are moving rapidly from one event to the
next, but it all signifies nothing, existentially they are standing still.
People’s ‘histories’ can now be reduced to a single digital footprint.
The footprint is quantitatively large but it’s a single lonely footprint
unaccompanied by its pair counterpart, with no sense of direction and purpose. Electronic
memories don’t take strolls, they don’t take walks, they are simply standing
still. ‘Solvitur ambulando’ as the Latin phrase goes, but if we are standing
still, it means our lives remain unresolved, and unsaved. Our entire lives a
big fat question mark?
Electronic
memories do not arrest a gaze because they are mundane; they have no narrative
power. Nothing distinguishes them from one another. Electronic memories are ‘atomized
time’. ‘Due to the lack of narrative tension, atomized time cannot hold
our attention for long. Atomized time is a discontinuous time. There is nothing
to bind events together and thus found a connection, a duration. The senses are
therefore confronted with the unexpected and sudden, which, in turn produces a
diffuse feeling of anxiety’ (Han).
There is a
common saying in our times that ‘if it’s not on the gram, then it didn’t happen’.
The irony of that is the fact that if it’s on the gram, that means it was gleaned of
life through that process. A chunk of experience was sacrificed at the altar of
the Instagram gods. Nowadays, when you have to stop what you are doing to take
a picture, then you are not doing what you are meant to be doing anymore. The difference
between the photos in my mom’s albums and Instagram is that taking a photo of an
event back then was a part of the experience, it added to the experience and
the picture was singular. Taking a photo for the gram interrupts the experience
and diminishes it and the more this instagramming take place, the more the pictures
lose their uniqueness. Kabir, the poet, puts it better when he writes, ‘If
you have not experienced something for yourself, then it is not for real.’
And since taking pictures for Instagram robs the moment of its experience, and
the posing and curating robs the moment of its realness. It would make more
sense to draw the conclusion that if it’s on Instagram then it didn’t actually
happen. Han writes, ‘A fulfilled life cannot be explained on a quantitative
basis. It does not result from a plenitude of possibilities, just as recounting
or listing of events does not necessarily amount to a narration or account.
Rather, the latter require a special synthesis to which they owe their meaning.’
Today, we have more photos than we know what do with and because the ‘medium
is the message’; following Marshall McLuhan’s thinking, human beings have
become servomechanism of phones. The compulsive photo-taking serves the medium
although it disguises itself behind serving the people taking the pictures. The
proliferation of pictures without any sort of synthesis drains life of its
meaning. ‘It is not the total number of events, but experience of duration
which makes life more fulfilling. Where one event follows close on the heels of
another, nothing enduring comes about. Fulfilment and meaning cannot be
explained on quantitative grounds. A life that is lived quickly, without
anything lasting long and without anything slow, a life that is characterized
by quick, short-term, and short-lived experiences is itself a short life, no
matter how high the ‘rate of experience’ may be’ (Han).
‘…he who
contemplates does not absorb the object into himself. The long, contemplative
gaze trains itself in the preservation of a distance to the things, without,
though losing their nearness. Its spatial formula is that of a distanced
nearness.’ My mother’s photo albums are a space of contemplation. Each photo
absorbs me, pulls me in and there is a losing and subsequent finding of self
through the album. I, however, do not absorb the album into myself. Sacred things
retain their separateness. Cell phones have become extensions of selves, the
contiguity between device and person dissolved. When people cannot spend time
away from their devices, it isn’t about missing important communication, its more about the fact that we’ve absorbed the devices into ourselves. The device is a
material containment of parts of ourselves like horcruxes and we are as
territorial of them as Voldemort was of his horcruxes. We can therefore
not truly contemplate them and consequently cannot see the thing properly and
since we've assimilated the device into ourselves, even the way we see ourselves
is obscured. To be able to see something, there has to be a distance between us
and the object. The galleries on our smartphones, although quantitatively
significant, do not offer much of substance to us; if any. And if there
was something to be grasped; we would have no way of seeing it. As Cousineau
puts it, ‘I don’t believe that the problem is in the sites as it is in the
sighting, the way we see… we look more and more but see less and less’.
The photos in my
mom’s album went through a selection process. Not the arbitrary selection of
the best picture out of 100 to post on social media, but the actual event
itself goes through a selection process. The camera only made cameo appearances
at events that were deemed important and significant enough and there was also
a meaningful order to the events themselves. Nowadays, the camera is whipped up at the least provocation: meals, gym, coffee runs, getting dressed, buying new
things, pets being pets, children being children etc... everything has become
an event. The wisdom of Patrick Lencioni prevails, ‘If everything is
important, then nothing is’ i.e., if everything is an event then nothing
is. This is why digital spaces are unable to captivate us. ‘Events are no
longer linked up into stories. The narrative chain, which yields a meaning,
operates by making a selection. It strictly regulates the sequence of events.’
(Han). Histories bring things together; they are narrative in structure. My
mother ‘was able to collect the events around’ her as Han puts it and
allowed her history to emerge and we, her descendants, are anchored and can
gain purchase into the world because of it. ‘History as directed time protects time
against decay, against its dispersion into a pure sequence of point-like
presences.’ These ahistorical spaces that we participate daily in, disperse,
dissipate and dissolve us and ultimately render us invisible. ‘The decay of
the temporal continuum renders existence radically fragile. The soul is permanently
exposed to the danger of death and terror of nothingness, because the event
which wrests it from death lacks any duration. The intervals between events are
death zones. During these eventless in-between times, the soul falls into
lethargy. The joy of being mingles with a fear of death. Exaltation is followed
by depression, by an ontological depression even.’ (Han). Our digital footprints
are indistinct from the general sludge of the internet space which means the
way we regard them is the same as the way we regard everything else in the
space and since everything on the internet is scattered and pulling in
different directions, it confuses us. And since we are unable to stay on
things long enough to struggle through to elucidation, our confusion turns into
boredom, we give up and move on to the next stimuli. Hurston Smith wrote in the foreword
to The Art of Pilgrimage, ‘But by attending to [obstacles] now-
openness, attentiveness, and responsiveness are the essence of pilgrimage- you
will be able to surmount them by yielding to them in the way that life always
requires that we yield to it. And draw the resilience you will need from those
who have preceded you, for pilgrims are a hardy breed.’ Which is why
histories are so important. When the story unfolds and we see how those who
came before us struggled through the obstacles that made them who they
eventually became, we are encouraged. The tools for posterity to become ‘a
hardy breed’ themselves are laid bare before them.
Pilgrimages are durable
and histories are as well. Internet spaces are spaces characterized by instantaneity;
they hold no duration which is also a part of the reason they are ahistorical. Han
describes electronic mail as follows: ‘Electronic mail produces instantaneity
by destroying the paths as spatial intervals in their entirety… Intervals
structure not only perception but also life.’ When I behold my mom’s photo
albums and think through the chain of mini-events that took place from the
point a picture was taken to it making its way to the album, it is just a
process brimming with interval spaces. From waiting for the film to be used up, to
dark rooms, and archiving, there are spaces of deliberation, selection, waiting
and lingering and these structure life. Its even in the descriptive languages
of these processes. Traditionally, photos were developed and now they are
printed. When something is printed, there are implications of replication and
sameness (sludge). When a picture is developed, there is an anticipation to it;
we are awaiting a transformation. Transformations are a long time in the making
and are not instantaneous. Even dark rooms remind us of a time when everything wasn’t
as glaringly ultra- transparent as they are now. Mystery and spaces of becoming
have given room to intransmutable digital footprints.
As I return my
mom’s photo albums to the place reserved for them, I feel like I have been a witness
to the life of a great crocodile. I am now at a new Here equipped to return to
life and live as fiercely as my mother did.
‘Traveler, there is no path
Paths are made by [putting our
smartphones down and] walking’
Antonio Machado with annotation
Robala ka kgotso, Kwena ya metsi
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