Pictures of Life
In the selfie, I am to the right of the frame holding the camera and the Golden Gate Bridge is in the background. I am smiling. This is my happy place. At the end of a race cycle. Fit, healthy and traveling for an event.
In the selfie, I am smiling. To the right of the frame, holding the phone with outstretched arm. A Joshua tree is in the background back-lit by a morning sky so blue it hurts. This is my happy place. Exploring. In the becalmed waters of the post-race adventure.
In the selfie there is a spring-green abandoned rail spur stretching off into the distance like a wilderness tunnel. I am smiling. Relaxed. It is a rest day. Careful scrutiny and proficient eyesight might catch the black and white of the dog somewhere in the verdant details.
It is a Sunday and I have too much to do, but the dog and I have an unspoken agreement of daily perambulation that must be obeyed.
In the selfie I am at a charitable event. The backdrop is the library. I am to the right of the frame and smiling. There has been a pause in activities. Inspiration, boredom, habit or opportunity have conspired for me take out my phone and take a picture. I am tired. The week has gotten away from me again.
…
And so, life plays out before me now in a series of impromptu digital renderings. Each framed carefully to show me somewhere doing something that I think might be worthy of recording.
This is our lives now. Digital snippets of smiling faces. Proof to the world, keening screams to the world, that we are still alive, still here and by God still having a fun and fulfilling life.
297 words to get to the point.
A famous writer of awful and shocking fiction that thrilled Gen X’ers, whom I recently listened to, admonished writers never to use exact numbers. Never, for example say it was 85 degrees Farahnheit. Instead, say something like ‘It was just hot enough to raise a sweat, and he considered changing into a short sleeve shirt before he left the house…’
So instead of ‘297 words to get to the point’, how about, ‘enough words to cause interest were spilled, but not enough to bring substance or clarity’.
…
I was building a website last weekend. Don’t ask why. On the one hand I should just pay someone who knows what they’re doing to build a website. On the other hand, it’s pretty easy and engaging a resource is such a pain in the ass.
It’s not hard. But each time I go about the building or rebuilding of a website the technology has unkindly lurched forward and there is a learning curve. I need to sit down and focus on it. The learning curve can be soul sucking, time sucking and slightly humiliating.
Part of the process is to gather content for the website. Part of that content is images. And since this new website is about me, and God knows I don’t have the time or patience to organize actual photography, I was sorting through recent pixel paintings of myself for use in the endeavor.
I found this phenomenon of selfies.
This infinite echo of selfies.
Over the last decade or so since phones with good cameras have become ubiquitous. Everyone has become a photographer and in some sense a documentarian. We are all little Ken Burn-es manically angling for the best shot to capture the essence of the moment, to tell that story.
Photographs before mobile phones were mementos in their scarcity.
Personal mementos. Memories plucked from the past. Carefully framed for the purpose or accidentally capturing some innocuous slice of life to be printed and stuck in a glossy album. To be trotted out at holidays when the family was gathered.
After the turkey, the matriarch, on the flower-patterned upholstered couch, would force an audience and say something like ‘Remember this time we were at the seashore? Look at you. You were just two and I bought that swimsuit at the Montgomery Wards.’
Faded photographs.
Faded memories.
Now we document our lives day to day, or more accurately we curate our lives for external consumption, plucking out what we think is the best narrative to support the assertion, (not always a lie), that we lead purposeful, compelling, happy lives.
And I found in my search for reasonable images of my current self this series of nearly identical selfies. Nearly identically framed. Nearly identically smiling.
When you get to be my age you have found the best smile. The one that makes you look kindly and thoughtful, not manic and needy.
But of course, like all smiles, it is a mask.
The only genuine smile is carnivorous.
This selfie-smile is, as they would say, ‘putting on the best face’. (I don’t know who ‘they’ are in this case but surely, they have used this idiom.)
‘Putting on a brave face’, is how it is spoken sometimes.
But through your life you find a smile and a face and you practice it in the mirror until you can, with the snap of a finger, or someone saying ‘cheese’, appropriate it and imprint it on a memory.
Thus arriving at the hoped for magic of “You look so happy.” Or “You look like you’re having fun.”
That may be true.
Or not.
It is the face we choose to paper over the synthesis that is actually happening in our unnecessarily large and active brains.
And I wonder what will happen to all these digital renderings of me, frame-right, smiling?
In the old days photographs were like a quirk of DNA. You passed them down through the family until there was no one left. This was one of the final acts of life, dispersing the curled books of sepia renderings of Uncle Fred among the surviving offspring.
Now, I expect they will just vanish into the great data cloud to be reformatted into free electrons and photons for the next 10,000 selfies of that Joshua tree.
Although, there is such a vast quantity of images floating around that maybe some useful demographic information can be mined by the AI to move us all forward in a beneficial way?
More likely they will be mined to find a way to sell more toothpaste.
Maybe there needs to be a digital selfie foundation, like the projects that the Smithsonian runs to save old folk songs and Appalachian dialects.
Until that time I will be in the right of the frame, apparently well-adjusted and supremely happy.