an old traveler

Time on my hands, you in my arms

Nothing but love in view.

Then if you fall, once and for all.

I’ll see my dreams come true.

-Al Bowlly, 1930

I’d like to speak simply for a moment about my fascination with all things left behind, and also of my appreciation for the devices used to carry them through time and space. These mecha of relatively contemporary creation; the audio recorder and the film camera (whose invention finally caught up with the more primitive ways of moving a particular aesthetic moment forward in time and space) allow us a narrow window into the very soul of the moment. For while musical notation long written down, or brush strokes long dried on a canvas, can illuminate, at best, a recreation of that which was, it was not until the advent of the camera and the audio recorder that something could be captured in it’s detailed entirety for centuries to come; holding within it the subtle and unintended details that often carry the true spirit of the encapsulated moment. And while these vague and haunting nuances imply a magnitude of indirect and unspeakable beauties and points of interest, there is one particularly relative point of interest whose stature is both veiled, and as clear as day, that I would like to mention, and to store, ironically, in this particular vehicle of time travel.

The ability to recreate a moment of the present that has long since passed, to such a degree as to completely deceive the particular sense it appeals to (ie; sight, sound), allows that long passed moment of the present to echo and endure indefinitely. It brings to life a moment whose inhabitants are, as we are, clearly unaware of the fact that their existence will soon be rendered all but meaningless in the decades to come– meaningless if not for that one particular fragment that happened to be preserved for the curious eyes and ears of generations to come, long after the subject in question’s flesh and bones have been returned to the soil. It is disturbing to me, to hear a voice from the turn of the century lament about having too much time to dwell in the happiness of the moment, as I have often done, when that particular moment is merely an echo left behind from a person long dead; from a voice in their early and careless years.