This was a long time ago, seems like, and far away, but it did happen, and hopefully not the last time. The first photo is all of the ‘outlaws’: those who married into this particular family gathering, including myself. I will note, now, that I’ve had a tab open with Robin’s newsletter. In my head, I keep coming back to two passages:
Toil in the shadow of calamity WILL have its day.
and
There’s a kind of grit required to get through creative failure, whether that’s commercial rejection or just your own frustration with yourself; you might be acquainted with it. This crisis demands another, deeper kind of grit, because this crisis whispers in your ear:
Even if you succeed, it won’t matter. That thing you do, it is not life and death, and everything now is life or death, one or the other, with nothing in between. Your pampered preoccupation is utterly trivial. It took a pandemic to make you see it, but it’s been true all along.
That little snake voice, the one that says “You don’t matter, your feeble attempts at art making mean nothing, they’re bad anyway,” is an emotion I know all too well. You don’t toil at a thing in relative obscurity for as long as I have without having those thoughts. It’s really part of why I can be so shy when I’m out with the camera; it’s easy to think that what I’m doing doesn’t matter and I shouldn’t bother people with it.
The workshop I went to last October had one of the questions aimed at this, sort of. The last day, the fifth question was: If today was your last 24 hours on earth, you’re leaving on a space capsule, and you only get to take with you the pictures you take now, what do you take? Now after we’d done the exercises, we were talking about the uses of the questions, and I asked, “How often are you doing ‘last 24’?” Sara, the instructor, said without hesitation,“All the time.”
And if you think about it, it kinda makes sense: all the time, it could be your last 24 hours to make art, to look and see, and be in the world. So to be thinking, is what I’m doing important enough to take with me? If it is, then dammit, there’s room for me to be here making it. Somewhere, probably instagram, I saw a poem that included the line “You are allowed to occupy space,” and that’s maybe something I didn’t always feel entitled to? It’s true, though: even though the world doesn’t always want to give it to you, it’s OK to be here and do your thing.
So, remember your Baldwin (emphasis mine):
For nothing is fixed,
forever, forever, forever,
it is not fixed;
the earth is always shifting,
the light is always changing,
the sea does not cease to grind down rock.
Generations do not cease to be born,
and we are responsible to them
because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails,
lovers cling to each other,
and children cling to us.
The moment we cease to hold each other,
the moment we break faith with one another,
the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
