Summer Fatigue
You know how it is. I know you do. From time to time you hit a wall. You're overwhelmed. You're fatigued. Exhausted. Everything is chalk. People say things. You observe things. It's too much. And the news of the day...it continues to creep into you, unsettle. It makes you nervous and on edge. The agressive unleashed dog from the next street over attacks your passive law abiding dog and in your mind this takes on symbolic and mythic proportions. (Even though nothing much came of the bared teeth and hackles up grandstanding).
I'm unhappy with my writing. Unhappy with my photographs. I'm unhappy with a bunch of stuff. I feel like screaming. I don't. Maybe it's menopause. Maybe it's summer fatigue. Maybe it's just that I need to slow it all down.
I was reading Krista Tippett in conversation with Enrique Martinez Celaya and while the whole interview was interesting, there's a part about photographs that stopped me in my tracks.
Mr. Martínez Celaya: And as such, there is a grief, a mourning of the loss of — always built into a photograph. On my painting table, I have a photograph of Robert Frost with his son, Carol. And Carol, many years after that photograph — in the photograph, Carol is maybe 13. Many years later, Carol committed suicide. And I have that photograph with two apples from Robert Frost’s orchard on my painting table. And I look at it every day, and I think: That photograph knew everything that was to come, sort of in the leaning of Carol toward his father — the future was there. And I look at it every day to figure out if I can catch it, and which part of it.
So then, three inches away, I have a picture of my son and I. It’s still unfolding. And I’m trying to understand how that photograph, who tells me that I don’t exist for it, is holding all that will be in its place. And I think that’s what photographs can do, in some ways. And like many other things, by taking so many photographs, by having them in our phones, we don’t look at them carefully enough. And in fact, they have become sort of a testament of having lived, when in fact what photographs do is say: You’re no longer.
Maybe it's the loss and the grief of photographs that I need to contend with. Maybe it's that I need to look at them more, longer. Even though I mainly take photos with my DSLR, they too, go by too quickly. I don't look at them carefully enough. For long enough. They're mine, and I might post a fraction of them, but I don't stay with them for long. I'm off to the next thing.
The other thing I know to do when I'm feeling like this, is to sit down with some books of poetry on my lap, and turn off the computer. Turn off whatever needs turning off. Put my phone in the far reaches.
I took out Wendell Berry's book, This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems. I read this:
Again I resume the long
lesson: how small a thing
can be pleasing, how little
in this hard world it takes
to satisfy the mind
and bring it to rest.
