within the winds that blow the sails
of my soul,
and send me onward.
I arrived in time this morning, early, the first. I have been dreaming vividly, dreams so real that I wake up with a plan already formed to counteract the mistakes of the dream-me. I woke the other day ready to email the College dean about my room, because it was the wrong one. When I have such real dreams, I start to wonder what the dream world is. When the dreams are hazy and unrealistic, it isn't hard to think of them as regular dreams, just our minds imagining away as we sleep, the cogs of thought continuing to move while the body rests. But then there are those dreams that happened. They were of a different caliber than other dreams. Maybe the BFG was a little too enthusiastic.
I have written the first third of my essay. I still need to negotiate the watery depths of the other two thirds, and then make the return voyage, double checking that this is the route I want recorded for posterity. Shall I look to the stars for guidance? It is difficult writing about what I'm writing about, paradoxically because it is so interesting. These papers are different to DS papers, which is probably obvious seeing as they're not DS papers. They have a different sense though: less rushed, less restricted, less pressure. Also I want to sit and write. I want time, time to sit and think about everything that I could be thinking about.
There is a man in a green-blue shirt sitting five metres away from me. His hair is tousled, brown, blonde, in between. I think he is writing an essay, but I also saw that he was on Facebook. Is that how we write these days? Multitasking is the word, or so I have heard. Do you think that the more we feed our senses, the more perceptive we become? Are we able to multitask better if we give ourselves more tasks? I wonder. He has a lime-green phone case, and he is sitting up straight. Is that how we write these days? Straight up. It may be because he is tall. Do you think that being tall and sitting up straight is a sign of confidence? Isn't it traditionally tall people who slouch? Well, he is very tall and he is sitting up tall too. Too tall to be small? I wonder. He reads. He pauses. He types a sentence. Pause. He highlights the typed evidence of thought in a milky blue and presses delete. It's a macbook, so it's delete, not backspace. On my laptop, I can delete and I can backspace. Do you think that that influences the way that my thoughts exist. First, is there a difference between backspace and delete, or are they one in the same? And second, has the ability to so easily undo our thoughts changed the way we think? Are we more reckless now, because we can undo? Or would you term it more enthusiastic, more eager to think, to experience because we are able to forget our mistakes. Or maybe typing has nothing to do with the way we think, because letters are generic and anyone can write them, while handwriting it genetic, heretic, specific. Handwriting is personal. That's why I love letters.
Being away from important people has forced me to try out a whole host of different conversational mediums. I have been the letter-writer, the whatsapper, the emailer, the instagrammer, the facebooker, the vlogger, the blogger, the phoner, and finally, as of today - and that one moment when I sent Granny a postcard from the Vatican in 2013 - I am a post-carder. By far my favourite way to communicate - apart from actual speaking - is with letters.
We have been discussing the impact that a photo can have, in our Victorian Photography class, and one of the points raised was the question of the photograph being a way of stealing a moment from the subject of the photo, creating a reproducible image of a soul which, according to one critic, Walter Benjamin, "shatters the aura" of the subject. When I heard the word aura, my ears pricked up like a little dog's when it hears the word "walkies". There are few things that excite me more than a discussion, in any regard, of the "other". Aura is other. Like a dream. And thus I was thinking, does receiving a letter from someone, a physical reproduction of their thoughts shatter the person's aura the same way that a self-portrait's aura, which the subject was happy with and sent purposefully to you, is supposedly shattered?
A man with curly grey hair trapezed past with two blue tea-cups balanced on two red teapots.
I personally do not think that the aura of the subject of a photo is "shattered" when the photo is taken, or reproduced. I think that auras exist in a realm that humans cannot interfere with. A counterargument to that could be that cameras exist in a realm that humans do not, and can therefore pierce into the world of auras where humans never could. But I think that humans are above cameras on the perceptiveness scale, something that I would measure how we can affect the other realms by, because realms aren't much unless we have some perception of them, right? And so I would rank them:
aura
human
machine
I don't really know what I'm talking about, but writing about history and being around so many people who have all been affected by that history, and are part of the making of more history which will affect them and their children in the future, is an eerie experience, and one which makes the concept of an "other" seem like not such a distant and unbelievable idea. I feel as if I am living in so many worlds, because, even though I can't see it, I - and my thoughts and soul - make up each other individual's world. Their worlds would look different if I, and every other unique person in this space of time and existence, wasn't here. So by virtue of that, I am living out my own perception of my existence, and everyone else's perceptions of me too.
So back to the photography question, about the shattered auras. I think that maybe if the subject of the photo could exist in complete isolation - imagine a void full of nothing but the subject - and if you could somehow obtain an image of that subject without anyone having any interaction with it, allowing no perception of the object whatsoever, then maybe the aura of the subject might be shattered when the image is viewed, because the aura of the subject would never have the chance to be viewed in completion. But at that rate, isn't every aura a shattered aura? When you observe someone, you only observe what you sense of them, which can never be their whole being. You perceive fragments of them, for whatever reasons, and as such no image can render whole what even in reality cannot be perceived as anything more than fragments.
This is so interesting!
I have to go home soon, because I am nearly hungry.
And then I need to make my video.
But I am grateful for the opportunity to sit here and think. Thinking is such a powerful phenomenon: it can make you go crazy, numb you, or have no effect at all. Do you think that you can perceive your whole self? Or is the person you always thought of as "you" merely a fragment of the whole? And will you ever be able to perceive that whole? Do you think that a photo of you is maybe a scary thing, because it can capture your whole, when even you can't? Or, as I often feel like saying when we end up getting carried away in class, isn't it just a photo?!
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