letters from barabbas

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

--from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Sometimes I forget why God gave me glasses--to remind me that I can't see much ahead of me: I can't even see past my elbow when I hold my hands out. I can draw connections between the aspects of a moment. I'm good at that. Very analytical and all. And I'm learning how to see things (through those corrective lenses first), to capture an instant's subtleties with my parents' dusty Canon. It's thrilling, but, it's not really seeing. Not how I'd like to. I'm too often looking back, when I'm feeling particularly good. But mostly I'm just staring squarely at my feet. How does one see (and not just look) outside oneself? I wish I knew what was going on. Not just in my little existence, but in eternity. This moment here is pretty useless, severed from the flow of time. I hardly ever remember exactly when I took a specific picture, and all those sloppy journals seem like someone else's artifacts. What's really going on, is what I would like to know.

# posted by David : 10:27 PM