Mind photos
I was driving in the dark in the rain the other day. Significant rain. Significant dark. The kind of rainy dark people write poetry about. The kind that comes at you from all directions. There I was, the roar of it all around me, watching great arcs of water curl up like waves from beneath the wheels of anybody ahead of me driving too close to the edge of the lane, whump, through a puddle. It was melodramatic, as was I. Not sad, exactly, but contemplative. I came to a set of lights then, and I glanced down at my hand on the steering wheel. Under the street lights and through the lens of the thick rain on the windscreen, the shadows dripped long, lugubrious droops of water rhythmically down my fingers. It was beautiful and slightly alarming, as though what I was actually watching was the blood pulse through my veins or my hand being swiftly dissected.
It was a moment I couldn’t photograph. There was nobody to show it to. I wondered: did that make the moment more meaningful because nobody saw it? Or, as our memory would have us believe, as Instagram would have us believe, is the moment not important at all, because nobody saw it?
Our minds have a way of prioritising certain moments. It’s as though they take photos at certain points and keep them on file. Birthdays, sometimes. A pivotal argument. A random moment when you were seven and you ate a wad of butter at a birthday party at the Pancake Parlour thinking it was ice cream because you were too embarrassed to spit it out. Random example, obviously.
But what kind of a filing system is this? For starters, its own terms don’t seem to operate. Sometimes there’s no photo on file for moments that are supposed to be significant. I know someone who doesn’t remember her own wedding. There are moments I forget from very significant times in my life.
Now, I’m no filing expert, but I find this system to be massively flawed. Not only is it undemocratic, but it’s not a true reflection of reality. This has annoyed me since childhood (don’t I sound fun?) as a result of which I have, many more times and far more recently than you might imagine, attempted to hack the system by focusing very hard on a deeply boring moment.
“This is an important moment!” I will tell myself as I stare at the wall in a waiting room at the dentist. “Never forget this!”
This has never worked. Either it doesn’t work for anybody because this is a universal experience, or it doesn’t work for me because the person curating my filing system is a Dadaist or a postmodernist or sometimes asleep at the wheel.
What is the point of all this?
I just think sometimes little moments like the one with the shadow-hand-rain-blood-vessels should be given precedence over things like, say, the lady in the school uniform shop shouting out that your head was too fit for “even the adult man sizes”. Another random example I just thought of.
So. Public Service Announcement: unimportant bits, rise up.
Rise: the moment you get the nine letter word in one glance in the cafe while you’re waiting for a coffee and there’s nobody there to boast about it to.
Rise: phone and meeting doodles that you wouldn’t mind popping in a frame actually.
Rise the moment of quiet mutual greeting through the glass when you see someone from a distance.
Rise, tiny buds in the garden. Rise!
Lovely shadows: awaken!
The way your grandma organises her spices: amen.
The sound of a car on gravel when you’re expecting someone late at night: behold!
The little life you saved by pachoinging a bee out of danger with a stick: a moment large in the life of the bee, so why not yours?
You know what little moment should be broadly celebrated? The ceremonial opening of a new spread. Vegemite. Peanut butter. That little untouched mound, sometimes with a slight twist in the top; a blank page awaiting the adventures of breakfasts future.
We might forget these things. I certainly do, even if I’m yelling at myself to remember them. But maybe remembering isn’t everything. Maybe the democratisation of moments doesn’t need to involve consultation with the postmodernist in charge of memory. Maybe it’s enough to just look at your hand in the dark in the rain and smile quietly to yourself before the lights change.