How I Turn Time into Pleasure
I’ve this I suppose you could call it
(as I will, especially if I spend too
much time on it in one stretch)
guilty pleasure of going through
old photographs of mine online,
correcting the dates, the locations,
tagging the people I know in each
photograph, and even the lives
of my forbears from as far back
as I have such photographs (and
that’s pretty far back as I’ve some
family photos that date from the mid-
1800s), essentially piecing together
a life, my past, what got me here,
a rendering somewhat outside of
myself of who I am. I say “guilty
pleasure” because I can get lost
in the task and in doing so ignore
for hours or an entire day or so
the things I surely need to be
doing, things much more
important than this habit
I have. It’s a useful habit,
though; it is quite practical,
at least for me. I write to
remember, as I always say. For
the same reason I generally take
a photograph. Because I’ve always
seemed to have trouble remembering in
whatever way or ways it is most people do.
I imagine that there are six or seven ways
people generally remember things, and
whatever my way of remembering is,
it seems unfamiliar or rare, at least
when I try to compare it with others’
methods, which becomes clear when I
attempt to discuss memory with other
people. These photos, I might add as a
reminder, and the words I’ve slammed
together over the years, I have saved
just like the photographs, they are all I
have left of the first 50 years of my physical
life. I lost everything in one of those ordinary,
almost cliche, yet tortured ways people often
do, it seems: standing at the sidelines watching
it all disappear, so to speak, in a resigned,
exhausted, helpless way. The loss of these
things, this physical stuff, is not for me a
hard loss (except when I think of the shelves
filled with familiar books that always stood
stacked like walls around me; and only then
sometimes), especially since I had the
forethought to begin at an early time
cataloging these pieces of me and
my life and the life of those around
me, including pretty much hording
every random photo I’ve ever taken,
as electronic files, going to the trouble
of scanning all of my photos from before
a certain time period, making all of
those electronic as well. The files
which I now spend maybe
too much time getting
lost within, cataloging,
tagging, dating, as a
way to piece together
a life, so that I may
better understand
who I am. And,
despite or through
it all, this life, these
pictures are there,
representing where
I’ve been, from whence
I came, act not as a reference
to a place or time I yearn to go back
to, although they do fill me with such a
warm and pleasant nostalgia, but mostly
they continually teach me about myself, each
time I sit with them it seems I learn something
uniquely new to add to the collage of my idea
of who I am. They don’t answer all
of those questions, but they give
me enough to know which way
I should aim, which direction
my legs might take me next
in order to build in the most
appropriate way upon what
I have become, who I am,
what I’ve learned about who
I am and the things most
important to me. So, here’s to
guilty pleasures, I suppose. And
perhaps curtailing my time spent
with these pieces of my past so that
I might build more and better using
what I am at present, becoming who
I might best be, who I can be, during
the finite but luxurious stretch of time
that I have been allotted.
