I spent about 4 months with a particular roll of film in my camera. Through the brain fog and chaos while I was floating around Planet Taxol, an inability to properly focus, to frame or sometimes even hold the damn camera steady, a little magic happened.
This roll of film, in all it’s filminess, flimsiness and obscurity is the manifestation of a small pocket of time. That time when the internal world collided with the external world, giving me a Godalmighty bruise for which there’s not enough arnica in the world, my friend …
It’s like remembering snatches of things from when you were a child. Something elusive that’s beyond your grasp, and just when you think you’ve caught it, it flutters out of reach. You desperately try to recall a dream when you wake but it’s such a distillation of images that it’s little more than vapour. You just can’t seem to join the dots. A dream within a dream.
But I can remember watching the sunlight dancing on the tumbling water, and the heady, sickly odour of the tall pink spikes of soapwort growing on the riverbank. I remember the sound of the rain hitting the metal table and noticing the drops become ricocheting darts. Dappled light swaying through dense, textured plants or the sound of the breeze rustling the tamarisk. Peering through the cloudy voile of amnesia and sensing, feeling over seeing.
Isn’t that the most important function of creating? How you feel? Not what you want it to be, to look like when it’s finished? Colouring outside of the lines feels so free. creativity with a capital C (see my fingers doing air quote) isn’t really about templates, patterns and tutorials, right ways and wrong ways of doing things.
***
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
– Edgar Allan Poe