Capture
An important part of my writing practice for a long time has stemmed from the drive to capture, to arrest, to immortalise every beautiful cliche, every sublime sunset, every cloud, every flitting thought which dances through my head. It is this hubristic desire to somehow, in word, perfectly save every moment which dies in time, and often I have felt anguish at the imperfection of words and their inability to come even close to the feeling of watching a sunset over the Port Hills or studying clouds dancing high on the horizon of Te Whanganui-a-Tara or watching a beautiful person’s languor upon a beach.
The nearest I have got to this is the occasional word or phrase or even metaphor which dimly evokes a particular night or morning. But it is only because they remind me of the moment I imagined them. This frustrates me, because it is not the power of the words as such which conjures up these thoughts or feelings, but the power of memory which the words trigger. It makes it impossible for me to know whether another person, upon reading the words, would have even the faintest glimmer of understanding of the particularity of the beautiful light of that sunset, that cumulonimbus tower, that sailboat. I know that the closest they will get is an amalgamation of their own memories of suns, clouds, and ships, and that they will never understand my exact stance in relation to that moment.
Because as much as I like to pretend to the objectivity of moments, this desire to capture them can only encompass my own perception and subjectivity. I can dream of capturing, as Borges writes so often of, a thing so perfectly with words that both the words and the thing vanish from the universe, annihilating each other in the impossibility of two things exactly alike. To somehow divine and distil the essence of a thing or moment into language with complete comprehension.
In the end, though, I think this is an exercise in intellectual posturing. I don’t believe in a world of essences, and although this desire to arrest, halt, capture manifests itself in things, I think really I also want to preserve my self in relation to them, through their medium. It is not solely the precise ray of sun, the angle of a sail, or the curve of a wave that I seek to capture, not really. Rather, it is the moment of aesthetic feeling I get in relation to these partial objects, the swelling feeling of the mind, a sadness, a joy, a reflectivity, that I seek to capture. It might not be the ephemerality of the world which maddens me most, but the ephemerality of my own mind and affect. It is a dream of immortality, for myself and the world, for in the end, the two are inseparable.
I have written before of how it feels to write, how impossible it would be to write if I were not capable of declaring, with utmost narcissism, that I am the greatest. I do not think I could write if I did not harbour a sense that what I have to say is unique and somehow eternal, the first of its kind to emerge on the world stage. And it is strange to be able to say this and also recognise the clumsiness of my writing, still really only juvenalia, and to recognise how much of it is garnered and gleaned from other authors whom I admire, and how far short it falls of the quality of that writing in my own head.
Does this mean this need for immortality comes because I think I deserve it for whatever imagined greatness and glory I possess? Is it purely a delusion of grandeur? No, I don’t believe it works quite like that. Perhaps it’s simply the sadness at all the moments I have forgotten, for everyone and everything I have lost in such a short space of time (only two and a half decades). And that the narcissism is the survival mechanism developed so that I can believe I can recover all that, or if not recover it, at least slow the loss of everything else that is to come. If I can somehow communicate (despite the sheer impossibility of that act), then things will not be lost, I will not be lost, because one day, in ten thousand thousand years, somebody might read a sentence I have written and think they understand.
I’ve begun recording videos of stillness, of cloudscapes and plants in the wind and my own hand caressing rocks. Recorded on my phone’s crap camera these are grainy, shaky things, further from the true beauty of the world than any of my words. And yet — they still convey something. It feels like a shortcut, and perhaps it is, but for me it is nice to have a record of life like this. Because videos are so visual they make it easy to remember how it felt to stand on that hillside, watch that sky, listen to that city. I know not what, but they do something that words cannot. And I wonder if that is my own failing, that my words cannot capture whatever is in these lonely videos, or if there are simply differences in medium. The first video, from my month spent in Christchurch over the Christmas break, is below.
