Art of Savoring Reality

Digital cameras and all sorts of smartphones have made point-and-shoot photography a way to go. How often do you actually look at those tons of often bad-quality pictures? (‘I took this picture at night, used the night mode and everything, you can’t really see it I know… But trust me that building was beauuuuutiful!’ ‘Uh uh… I all I can see is a few gleaming lights in the background’) How much of that really stays in your memory? Or even more importantly: how much did you really enjoy what you saw?

Fast food photography bears little protein value for the aesthetic sense and the images evaporate from your memory as fast as they’ve been taken.

By contrast, painting/drawing make the objects portrayed acquire a new – personalized – meaning. The rule is pretty straightforward: you remember only what you paid close enough attention to (imagine being on the road trip for several hours talking to a friend, how much recollection of the surroundings will you have afterwards?) The artist studies his subject, observes and dissects it, makes it his own while precision is secondary.  Art is one of the few areas left where ‘fast’ doesn’t bear a positive connotation, which – the same as thousands of years ago – still needs concentration and creative spirit, things that don’t tolerate a rush.

Even if not for the sake of creating art, how invigorating can it be just to stop and observe the simplest things, re-learn to appreciate? Take a single berry (just one, not a handful), take a moment to see its shape and color, smell it, place it in your mouth and feel all the shades of taste. In adulthood we think we’ve learned it all, but we’ve forgotten even more.

Savoring reality is a form of art of its own. Chew slowly, you’ll live longer.

Things you can't unlearn

Bing: “You’ve got a new memory”. Thank you, sender.
Eyes closed, I fumble through the sounds in my pocket. Never alone, never the same is the sky.
Barely breathing, eyes ajar, I hear words, which swish by with a pace of a star, so you can’t recognize, but just listen in as if these were musical notes, warming more to the dear familiar voice.
Eyes ajar – flash! - night in daytime: city lights, rain and sounds, fingers, hands, hair strands.

 …”it’s getting dark”. I didn’t even notice. A glance sliding down the neck.
“You’ve got a new memory”. Thank you, dear sender.
I’m folding it up with care and storing away together with freshly ironed clothes.

stop to feel

Today the stars are raining down
Devoured by the light
We stop to think, we stop to feel
Unable on the run
I breathe with waves
That move ashore, I’m following the rhythm
Breathe in breathe out
Tide in tide out
I’m oozing through the sand

part of me

Memory is more that just a mind’s filing system, it molds you all way through, gets reflected in your judgments, reactions, view of the present. How strange it is then to feel someone else’s memory transmitted to you?
… I got 2 ugly plastic bags of old photographs. My grandfather’s photographs in dog-eared partially torn albums, heaps of them in smaller plastic bags, those originally destined for milk. Soon they covered all the floor of the room, hundreds of eyes looking at me, around, at each other, smiling and frowning, filling the room with long-forgotten emotions. So strange it was to recognize the faces even if you've never seen them that way. So strange it was to feel one’s own presence in each of them, so REAL it was, almost as if they evoked my own memories, which just somehow faded in the course of time like images in the straight sunlight. It almost felt like in a second, like in pictures from 'Harry Potter', people will start moving and talking. Some of them showed my family like i’ve never seen them, in others they had the same face expressions I saw with my own eyes an eternity ago. I cried several times out of that overwhelming recognition, out of inability to fathom that these people that look so alive, that are so dear to me are not here anymore.
Throwing old photographs away is a crime. It’s like throwing one’s own memories to trash.










I now think the charm of old photographs is not about the film. It’s in the fact that people back then still didn’t learn how to pose and wear picture-time smiles. Those smiles were real.